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Metro: Last Light preview: Once more, with feeling
THQ's Huw Beynon (that's pronounced "Hugh" by the way) calls last year's Metro 2033 "a flawed masterpiece." The Ukranian-developed shooter somehow managed to over-deliver on some of the rarest components and fail on the most obvious one; a mountain of wonderful flourishes toppled by a clumsy and downright bad combat system. 4A Games nailed the bleak, post-apocalyptic tone, coupled it with survival horror-esque resource management (like the necessity to monitor your gas mask filters), and layered in home-brewed weapons like the pneumatic shotgun which you pressurize, air pump-style. What it failed to do in 2033 was to make the combat compelling ... at all. So when Beynon calls it a "flawed masterpiece" that's what he's talking about. To correct this in the sequel, dubbed Metro: Last Light, the team at 4A has "rebuilt all of the gameplay systems from the ground up" meaning "better stealth, better weapons and core combat." If you're worried that this change might upset the original game's unique tone, like I was, Beynon says that's not their intention. "We don't want to dumb this down, or westernize it," he said. "We're giving the studio complete creative freedom to tell the apocalypse their way." THQ and 4A are avoiding the desire to follow the usual sequel route and "dial it up to 11." Since novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky's original sequel to Metro 2033, titled cleverly enough Metro 2034, didn't follow the same story, the team at 4A opted to handle writing duties in-house. "It's an original story that leads on from the end of 2033," Beynon told us. "The author of the original book actually wrote a pseudo-followup called 2034 which is a very different style of book entirely. He kind of describes it as an art-house thriller where the first one was perfect material for a video game." So instead, we're back in the Moscow Metro as Artyom, the unassuming protagonist from the first game. %Gallery-124654%
