Metro: Last Light - The big picture this time...

You know the saying "Fail to plan, and you plan to fail?", that is exactly how I feel now after that previous post; I acted out on passion towards an unrelated subject, one which is quite personal to me being male, terrible-looking and subject to a lot of rudeness and sometimes outright hatred from women in my time as a result (Some group of girls whispered about pushing me under a train, within earshot, at Cardiff Central Station, lol).  I struggled to put my finger on why this was until this morning, when some dots connected and I realized:  This is the work of the game weaving it's immersive black magic so proficiently, that I am seriously pissed off that this part of the story is so goddamn uncooked!

To understand how this is so, we need to start at the bottom:  The Graphics - yes, I know that great graphics push GPU power to stratospheric levels which in turn benefits GPGPU apps which then thrusts forward knowledge in medicine; but I personally consider them trivial compared to what we will get to.  Even so, it seems that the engine, while gorgeous, runs generally well at 1080p full detail on my i5-2500K and GTX560 non-ti; minor lag happens when masses of lights are introduced, but this is tolerable.  While we are on the subject of trivial matters, the gunplay is also relatively generic; it works and it does feel responsive enough to carry the game along, but it's not a patch on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with it's bullet drop and extensive upgrade trees with trance-inducing detail on how a block of magnesium will make the gun 0.1kgs lighter or some shit, or maybe that's just me going aspie in you lot.  So yeah, not the most astounding in terms of basic gameplay, but trust me, the devil's in the details.

Let's be honest here, when we want big-budget FPS action, we leave Metro well alone and fly over to Gears of War or Halo or relentlessly fished species of piscine that usually ends up covered in breadcrumbs.  When you fire up a Metro title (or a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title for that matter), you are here for the wasteland, this is the entity that takes the show for all it's worth and doesn't let go until there's nothing but bones.  This is mostly down to just how unflinchingly brutal and primal the environment is not only on the surface, but in the Metro as well; humans are on the verge of falling back to instincts wherever you look with bandits raping lone females, nazis acting like gods over "mutants" and even a wife who slept with one of these devils to save her husband, who subesquently got shot anyway.  This is exactly how violence and sex should be used in a game, not to cynically draw in the lowest common denominator but to show us just how close we really are to nature despite the best efforts of Victorian moral codes and attendant suppression of animal urges.  Speaking of moral codes, the moral points system makes an ambivalent return with actions like listening in on the prostituting wife or saving the potential rape victim making a white flash appear; these count towards the ending which is not to be spoiled!  I say ambivalent because the ending I got (the "Bad" ending, but how the hell is that the case?) left me almost in tears and genuinely made me think about whether people would talk about me in such a respectful, beautiful way should I die (Answer:  parties will be thrown, as well as bricks... at my tombstone.).

Neatly, this lets me come to the "Relationship" in the game; the way the "bad" ending went forced me to imagine how elegant the romance would have been if more time was given to it instead of Andrei the Fucking Blacksmith, that oh-so convenient plot device who serves only to give you a car, A CAR!  For christ's sakes!  He only appeared to save you from buckshot to the face in the previous game and suddenly he's worthy of appearances for fan service?  You might say he was in the book, but game stories run much faster than book stories do; a trivial incident like this can punch well above it's weight in a book because you describe every single solitary detail and the reader can take it all in at his pace; games lose that ability to their own pacing, therefore it would be perfectly acceptable to cut him out and have him leave a note or something, saving precious development time for more pressing characters while you work in almost as much hardship as your metro dwellers.

To wrap this all up, don't think for a second that I feel in any way bitter about this game; there is beauty in the beast and a beast can be found in any beauty no matter how divine.  I feel that in at least one regard a HUGE opportunity was missed to produce one of the quirkiest and most inspiring "love conquers all" stories of our time simply because of a lack of framing for Anna's early misandric conduct, something to explain why she acted like she did and more relevantly something to account for why she suddenly fancies you halfway through the game beyond "I was often left alone by daddy, I need feel-good now".  Apart from that, Metro: Last Light really does shine like a lighthouse made of rubies towering above the sea of grey goo that is FPS mediocrity, it just goes to show that combining "cool" elements and pleasing the largest number of demographics is truly the path to hell when it comes to making a momentous piece of art... yes, art...