I’m a couple hours into metro exodus and so far I absolutely love it.
Decent story, ok graphics, varied gameplay with some stealth and some fighting. Has some RE and TLOU vibes with the post apocalyptic theme plus the requirement to craft stuff.
What I’m most impressed with is how little hand holding the game has. I’m learning how to play it as I go along. Finding out when I need a mask and how the combat and stealth works. I find way too many games nowadays make everything about just following boring instructions that pop up in the HUD, following dotted paths and turning off your brain in favour of staring at the waypoint marker.
This game doesn’t do any of that. It relies upon you to listen to what the characters are telling you to do, figure out via trial and error what weapons and other tools do.
It is honestly so refreshing. I got so tired of setting my horse on auto pilot in AC Odyssey, being over powered in combat and basically never once having to figure out anything the entire game. It was never a challenge. Not just AC games but COD and even highly rated games like Witcher 3 or Horizon Zero Dawn were more about following the big waypoint markers, reading the on screen text, seeing the out of world context hint markers telling me where the resources were etc. I actually can’t think of the last game I played where my entire path the whole game wasn’t mapped out for me with dots, on screen graphics/text, big glowing markers and relied upon me to think about how #### works within the game world.
It really feels like I’m struggling to survive and when I die, instead of charging in guns blazing, I need to consider my next move, evaluate my strategy.
Trying to play an open world action game nowadays without waypoints, out of world maps and the like is impossible and many of them don’t even let your turn half that #### off because the hints and answers aren’t even located in world because the games are made for people who want the game to just take them to the next fight and plot point.
I know the games are different in style, this is a structured FPS game, not an open world action adventure, but it’s about the level of independence as a player and the respect the developers have for players to have a brain, use it and enjoy being challenged.
Could you imagine if all the old Zelda games just had giant waypoint markers that said “now go here” “then here” “then here”. They’d be so easy! Beating them wouldn’t have taken any effort or brainpower. Instead players were forced to read things in the game world and learn via trial and error, exploration, not some pop out text the devs put in as part of the HUD that explicitly tells a player what to do at all times.
This game has barely any HUD and never takes you out of the world so you can spend 20 minutes looking at a menu or skill tree.
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