Metro: Last Light review: red scare

Metro: Last Light expands the world of post-apocalyptic Moscow introduced in Metro 2033. Humans have been driven to the subway tunnels to escape a surface scarred by radiation and populated by vicious, mutated animals. At the end of the last game, protagonist Artyom used a newly-recovered missile silo to wipe out a mysterious race of psychic beings known as the Dark Ones. Last Light finds Artyom wracked by guilty nightmares until he discovers that a single Dark One survived the attack.

The end goal is set early on, but Last Light's plot swerves again and again right up to its last hour. Life in Metro exists within the delicate balance of four factions — the capitalist Hansa, the communist Red Line, the fascist Reich, and the neutral Rangers — and once again, Artyom interacts with NPCs from all sides throughout his journey. But there's more character here — and more nuance — than there was in Metro 2033. Some characters enter as cartoon villains, but Metro: Last Light manages to elicit real sympathy toward many of them by the end. You never quite know who to trust in Metro, but more interestingly, you never quite know who to hate.

Last Light breathes life into the colorless tunnels of the post-apocalypse — from the unsettling ordered nature of a Reich military camp to the eccentricities of the metro's theater zone to creepy catacombs that have been undisturbed by humans for decades. Each new location builds its own story organically, through incidental dialogue as you pass by NPCs, bodies that litter the ground and (sometimes literal) ghosts haunting every room. It's a harsh, devastated world but one that compelled me to return to uncover its history.

Those return trips to the metro weren't always as smooth as I wished. 4A Games continued work on its proprietary engine for Metro: Last Light, and while it looks gorgeous most of the time, I ran into a number of frustrating tech problems on the PC. Even with my decently outfitted rig — with an Intel Core i7, Radeon HD 6950 and 8GB RAM — certain levels brought my framerate to a crawl and even caused full-on, blue-screen-of-death crashes (Editors note: I experienced nearly identical framerate issues on a Core i7 3770 system with a 7970 and 16GB of RAM, with PhysX disabled — Arthur). The frequency of these issues was lessened by turning off the Nvidia-friendly Physx option (which was annoyingly set to on by default), but problems continued to pop up even on lower graphics settings, especially in some of the larger surface levels near the end of the game.