Metro 2039 Preview: Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:10] I've spent about 3 to 4 hours with Metro 2039 so far, and it's already healing me even as the in-game version of me, dubbed the stranger in the sequel, struggles to breathe through a gas mask whose filters don't last long, thus

[00:23] requiring me to craft new ones from items scrounged by scouring every last inch of its post-apocalyptic world as the countdown timer on my wristwatch constantly ticks down threatening to choke me to death if it hits 000.

[00:44] >> In a real world where AI's being shoved down our throats at every corner from our emails to the customer service reps we interact with, one of my biggest takeaways from Metro 2039 is that even though it's an apocalypse-ravaged

[00:59] though it's an apocalypse-ravaged hellscape, every inch of it is very obviously and very painstakingly hand-crafted, and I love that. This franchise always was like this, of course. This is

[01:12] nothing new. But still, there's just something about the way 2039 is hitting for me at this exact moment in time that I needed. It is a game that neither

[01:24] offers nor tolerates any bull and I love it for that because said >> Why am I telling you this? My God, you don't even realize what's happening. >> Metro does not hold your hand. It

[01:39] regularly keeps your blood pressure somewhere between slightly elevated and spiked, and it makes no apologies for it. Its irradiated world is hell, and it very convincingly conveys that at all

[01:54] times. And in an age where single-player first-person shooters are slowly going extinct because they only make money for their publisher once, while multiplayer live service shooters vie for our time and attention on a daily basis, and by

[02:08] the way, often contain lots of bull like microtransactions and or drawn-out gameplay loops, Metro's single-player only craftsmanship and attention to detail after my first few hours with it have me already

[02:23] prepared to call it my favorite first-person shooter in a long time.

[02:38] certainly be right at home, but even if you're new to this series, it's easy enough to get up to speed with. In short, everything is lethal. From the mutated monstrosities on the surface to rival survivors who've laid claim to the

[02:52] places you need to get through to the very air you breathe. You are almost very air you breathe. You are almost never, ever safe in Metro 2039. The one place you can't get killed is where my preview build started out, in

[03:06] the Sevastopolskaya, a metro station, which is filled with NPCs and shopkeepers. It feels very alive, a very stark contrast to the 180 that happens as soon as you grab your backpack and

[03:19] gun and exit the metro and head to the very dead surface. There, you are completely and utterly alone. Not literally, as there are mutated freaks abound, from giant man-eating rats to jumpy beasts that like to keep their

[03:35] distance and fling barbs from their tails at you, to oversized mosquitoes who like to get right in your face, to huge prehistoric-sized crustaceans who emerge from the waters of the sewers. And as mentioned, there are plenty of

[03:50] And as mentioned, there are plenty of other survivors out there, too. Except, all of them are hostile, or at least everyone I met outside of the metro during my hands-on time immediately wanted me dead. I appreciated being

[04:03] thrown straight into the deep end as soon as I reached the surface. Yes, a map on a crude tablet gave me a general idea of where to go towards my next objective, but beyond that, I was on my own to figure out the best path and to

[04:19] survive along the way. I wandered into a drug store, or well, the picked apart remnants of one, obviously, and I checked every nook and cranny for crafting items I could use to make medkits, ammo, and most crucially of

[04:34] >> [music] >> Pressing Y on the keyboard lifts your gun up a little higher so you can clearly see your digital wristwatch, which constantly ticks down the minutes and seconds until your current filter

[04:48] will expire. I found environmental puzzles tucked away in various places and felt compelled to try and solve them all because the reward would likely be those precious crafting resources that would well and truly keep me alive.

[05:03] Some of these puzzles utilize the Stranger's UV light, guiding you to follow clues that were scrawled on walls and floors such that they could only be seen under the purple hue. In my experience, these challenges may

[05:17] have been optional, but they were worth pursuing every single time. Again, it pursuing every single time. Again, it can't be said enough. Metro 2039 does not mess around. It does not waste your time. There doesn't seem to be any

[05:32] filler content here, at least so far. Everything seems to be meticulously Everything seems to be meticulously considered and implemented.

[05:44] onto themselves. They can all be modified and customized from their scopes to their hilts to their muzzles and more. At one point fairly early on, I found a double-barreled shotgun that I decided to swap out for the

[05:58] single-barrel version I had on me, and it became my go-to gun in the close-quarters dungeons I spent much of the latter half of my demo traipsing through. I even found a laser sight to attach to it, which is almost comically

[06:13] pointless on a close-quarters death dealer like this, but I didn't have anything better to stick on there, so I figured, "What the heck?" Oh, and as you may very well have guessed by now, ammo is scarce. You can find and craft

[06:28] different types, everything from rudimentary metal balls to incendiary rounds to armor-piercing machine gun rounds, and you'll certainly need to. I survived a mini-boss fight with a 9-ft tall mutant and his feral accomplices

[06:44] with so few rounds left on me that I prayed there was nothing else waiting for me for the next little while because the fight took place in knee-deep sewer water, which meant that I had nowhere that I could set my backpack down in

[06:59] order to craft more. Fortunately, Metro's game designers did take pity on me, and I was indeed given a short reprieve. But you also have throwables that help tilt the scales slightly back in your favor. I was quite

[07:14] fond of the knives as not only can they enable you to stealthily take out regular human enemies without alerting anyone else, but as you'd expect in a game with such stringent resource management, you can retrieve your blades

[07:27] from the corpses of your targets or the ground if you happen to miss a throw. But as the caliber of foe ramped up as I progressed, the Molotov cocktail started progressed, the Molotov cocktail started to get a lot more useful.

[07:45] about Metro 2039 so far is its gameplay variety. I was never doing the same thing for very long during my few hours with it, and I applaud it for that.

[07:57] As I mentioned, I started with a rare moment of safety in the metro station before moving topside and having plenty of room to roam while contending with the mutated bestiary I talked about earlier.

[08:15] toes with a number of different gameplay scenarios. At one point, I was conveniently left a scoped rifle on the decaying second story balcony of a building adjacent to a nest of Novoright members. They're the bad guy faction

[08:30] here under the direction of Führer Hunter, who was only teased in my demo, so I can't really determine much about the quality of him as a foe, besides the fact that he is very obviously a post-apocalyptic Hitler, and therefore

[08:45] I'll take great pleasure in gunning him and everyone in his ranks down in the final game. Sadly, I don't have any footage of this to show you. Anyway, I picked up that scoped rifle and started loudly picking off Novoright scum. They

[09:00] told on themselves by having bright lights attached to their weapons in the dark, making things a bit easier for me. Later, in a completely different scenario, I found myself in an abandoned daycare where my electronics got

[09:14] mysteriously jammed in one particularly creepy room, making my skin crawl despite there being nary a living creature around, and motivating me to want to get the heck out of there as quickly as possible.

[09:28] Thankfully, you do get a break from the constant juggling act of crafting and installing new gas mask filters in Metro's subterranean dungeons, at least. The air is clean enough in these to be able to safely remove your gas mask, and

[09:43] in the several I've battled through, all favored close-quarters combat, which made me all too happy to bust out that double-barreled shotgun I'd picked up early on. In one of them, I was able to choke out

[09:56] the only upstairs guard without alerting anyone below, and he was conveniently anyone below, and he was conveniently standing, or well, slouching now, next to an open air duct that let me creep down silently and in the shadows to the

[10:09] dark main base below, which was teeming with unfriendly humans. I botched my stealth attempt here trying to thread the needle with a thrown knife at a tough angle, and I got discovered. It then became an old-fashioned

[10:25] shootout, in which I was happy to break out Metro's lean feature from behind cover to expose as little of my body to the baddies as possible. This was the story of my hands-on time. Combat encounters came in many different forms,

[10:41] shapes, and sizes, and I really appreciated that. as no surprise to anyone that's played a Metro game before that 2039 is, visually

[10:56] speaking, gorgeous. It's bleak and horrifying, of course, but it's rendered beautifully. Developer 4A Games' proprietary engine is really cooking here, though I should confess that frame rate isn't something I can

[11:11] reasonably report on right now. Not just because I was playing a preview build of a game that won't be out for 6 months, but also because I was playing it remotely via GeForce Now. So, we'll have to see how it holds up

[11:25] once I can throw my own 5080 at it, rather than the 5080 that was feeding the game to me via the cloud. I've come this far in this preview and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what Metro 2039 is offering.

[11:39] Series veterans have no doubt already been nodding their heads along in satisfaction, while those new to Metro are in for a treat if the few hours I got to play are any indication. February 2027 was already looking

[11:53] stacked with the first big wave of post-GTA 6 releases, but Metro 2039 just cemented itself on my must-play list for that very crowded month. For more previews of the biggest upcoming games, don't miss our recent

[12:08] hands-on looks at Marvel's Wolverine and The Dusk Lords. And for everything else in the world of video games, stick with IGN.