![]() And you know the visor is a big deal when there's a button for it, dedicated just to wiping off the dirt and blood that accumulates," Keitzmann writes in his 9 out of 10 review. Air filters for your gas mask must be replenished when above ground, with a countdown on your watch reminding you how little time is left before the gasps and gulps set in. "The flashlight, which is necessary to ward off some of the scarier things scurrying out of Moscow's corpse, needs to be regularly charged with a small handheld generator. And for Joystiq's Ludwig Keitzmann, 4A Games has managed to do just that, while eradicating many of the niggles that distracted so many from its predecessor's qualities. Indeed, the most commonly expressed concern with Last Light is that it would lose the unique, uncompromising roughness of its predecessor - the very thing that divided the critics back in 2010. It was a more rewarding and memorable experience than any number of more polished and 'perfect' games - an idea that reviews of its sequel, Metro: Last Light, seem to acknowledge as if everyone had thought so from the beginning. It was brave enough to embrace the hopelessness of life after the apocalypse, allowing that hardship to seep into the moment-to-moment gameplay with a number of truly inspired mechanics: the steadily depleting gas mask, the currency system, the hand-cranked batteries, the pneumatic sniper rifles, a moral choice system so subtle that most players didn't even realise it existed. 4A Games created a vividly detailed world with a fine balance between horror and humanity, ghouls and grit. ![]() What those high-scoring reviews recognised was that Metro 2033 fell short in areas that a bountiful choice of less imaginative games succeeded, but it excelled in ways that very few games ever have. "A large shootout against an invading metro faction is dwarfed by any battle in Call of Duty, but feels ten times more important in your journey" Ludwig Kietzmann, Joystiq So it went with Metro 2033, it's Metacritic score occupying the same dubious turf as Army of Two: The 40th Day, with venerable outlets awarding it 9s, 4s and everything in-between. Games are all too often appraised like motorbikes or washing machines, as if their worth can be measured on a set of scales, successful features piled on one side, weak ones on the other, and a score determined from the balance between the two. Metro 2033's stealth mechanics were a tad unpredictable, the guns were somewhat weightless, and the enemies soaked up dozens of bullets before finally succumbing. We may claim to desire originality and creativity in our games, but these ideals are all too often side-lined in favour of indolent criticism. It was a rough game, to be sure, one blighted by apparently limited resources, making the sort of common and eminently forgiveable mistakes that tend to trap critics who lack a certain imagination and confidence. There was an inscrutable alchemy to Metro 2033 that exposed the weaknesses in a host of game reviewers.
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