15 years on from the release of Metro 2033, I still think with fondness and yearning of the Uboinik automatic shotgun. It’s a six chamber cylindrical affair with mouthwatering red shells that dangle before your trigger finger like pert, juicy plums. This is just to say / I have shot / the shells / that were in / the shotgun / and which / you were probably / saving / for the mutant round the corner. / Forgive me / they were murderous / so sockety / and so round. Ahem.
Reloading the shotgun is an intricate process of 1) sliding four shells into the available chambers while tossing the weapon jauntily from hand to hand, and then 2) cocking it again to expose and fill the remaining two chambers. You can also chamber a single shell and cock the weapon, if you don’t have time for a full reload, which means when you load another four shells and fire them, there’ll be an empty chamber to reckon with midway through the next burst. That empty chamber has gotten me killed a dozen times, I think.
Somebody poured love into that reloading animation. Love and a certain spitefulness. This is Metro 2033, 4A Games’s spiritual successor to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which takes place in the Moscow underground after the nukes. Ammo is also currency here, and the dingy rails teem with bandits and mutants. There is no time to get poetic about shotguns. Today, 15th April, you can experience all that love and spitefulness for free. The Redux edition is 100% off on GOG and Steam till tomorrow to mark the game’s 15th birthday.
In the RPS review of the original Metro 2033, Alec Meer (RPS in peace) was wooed but not wowed, calling attention to “a jarring disconnect between the excellence of its appearance and the adequacy of its action.
“It’s a good enough shooter, but it looks like it should be a phenomenal one,” he went on. “In a perfect world, there’ll be a mod that fiddles with the balance, maybe ups the human count and lowers the mutant count, and definitely leaves a few more gas masks lying around.”
The 2014-released Redux version adds a bunch of modes and graphics features: as Christopher Livingston summarised, “if you enjoyed Metro 2033, I strongly suspect you’ll like it even more on the new engine, especially since the options for a grueling, hardcore experience are still there despite the revamped stealth and improved AI making things a little easier for you.”
The typical question to ask of any 4A Games news piece is: which 4A Games, exactly? The studio began life in Ukraine in 2006, but in 2014, a portion of the team split off to found a new studio in Malta. While they’ve collaborated on Metro for years, the two studios are now totally separate: 4A Games in Ukraine have rebranded as Reburn, and are now developing La Quimera, while Metro remains in the hands of the Malta studio, who are still owned by Embracer.