Your journey takes you through the zones and stations occupied by the more dangerous, extremist Metro tribes, unsurprisingly - and into the mutant and ghost-ridden tunnels that link them. There's no overall ruler, just surly tolerance between some of these tribes, and open hostility between others. Each have their own territory, with their own laws. The pacifists, the communists, the neo-Facists.
20 years later, he and what's left of Moscow's population dwell in the tunnels and stations of its underground system, carving out a sad life of subsistence and violence, and divided into warring factions. You play as a young chap called Artyom, who was born just before the nuclear holocaust hit. It is a story of humanity nonetheless, not simply a journey into nothingness. In a world this dead, this hostile, it only makes sense that they're there. The mutants and ghosts don't need rationalisation here. It's something to do with making the game's world and atmosphere so intrinsically devoid of life and human hope - kind of like visiting Reading - that injecting the openly fantastical into it feels entirely convincing. There's definitely a commonality in terms of how it approaches environment-as-horror. It's more determinedly an action game than that, with puzzling kept to a bare minimum while enjoying dramatically superior production values and pacing. What it most evokes, I think, is Cryostasis with an enormous budget - a similarly ominous trek through a dead world, broken up by irregular, startling bouts of extreme violence. It's Half-Life, it's Bioshock, it's Call of Duty - it's anything but Stalker. It's a strictly linear first-person shooter, albeit with a touch of shopping and soaking up the atmosphere of civilian settlements in between dealing death to things that go bump in the subterranean perma-night. Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic shooter set in mutant-strewn modern Russian, but it's not open-world survival fantasy. It's very determinedly not like Stalker, and I can't imagine how many times the poor dears have had to bat away the same questions and presumptions.
In fact, it's not Stalker to the extent that, were you to say "Is this like Stalker?" to one of the ex-Stalker developers behind it, they'd probably punch you in the the nose, walk to the top of the nearest mountain and then scream in raw fury at the skies until someone shot them up with enough tranquilisers to knock out a blue whale. Hey! Stop that, you've got it wrong: this is not Stalker by another name.
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