After two games spent in the claustrophobic gloom of the Moscow Metro, it's a

strange sensation, at least for a Metro game, to suddenly be staring across a vast,
sun-bleached desert. Exodus is a post-apocalyptic road trip through a nuke-blasted
Russia, and an arid expanse of what was once the Caspian Sea is one of a number of
locations visited by Artyom and his band of survivors. But even with blue skies and
the closest thing you can get to clean air in this grim, dead world, survival is
still an everyday struggle.

I say road trip, but your primary mode of transport in Metro Exodus is an old
Soviet-era steam train called the Aurora. The game begins in familiar surroundings—
the shattered, radioactive ruins of Moscow and the labyrinth of tunnels beneath it.
But it's not long before the Aurora is speeding out of the fallen capital, along
the Volga River, and into the wintry countryside. This is your first taste of the
open world in Exodus, which is made up of several large, self-contained areas,
rather than one continuous sprawl.

Metro has always been a rigidly, sometimes suffocatingly linear shooter, but now
you have the opportunity to venture off the beaten path, scavenge, and explore.
It's a restrained freedom, limited by the size of the maps, but there's something
refreshing about an open world that focuses more on detail than size. Every
location the Aurora stops at feels wonderfully hand-crafted and the weather,
atmosphere, and lighting regularly change as the story spans the seasons, making
for an excitingly varied game.But this variety extends mainly to the setting and
structure. The brutal, kinetic first-person combat and lightweight survival
elements that define the Metro games haven't changed in any significant way. Ammo
and gas mask filters are still precious commodities, and Artyom still spends the
majority of the game in scrappy, tense firefights with other men in gas masks. This
means, despite the spectacular change of scenery, it still feels like part of the
series. But it also makes Exodus, in some ways, rather disappointing in its lack of
ambition.

The context, stakes, and location will change, and there are some fantastically
dramatic set-pieces to be found in here, but it's a shame how, fundamentally, every
encounter in Metro boils down to shooting people. I know it sounds like I'm
criticising an FPS for having too much S, but if you're going to give me this big,
fascinating, beautiful world to explore, I feel like there should be more
interesting ways to interact with it. Sometimes you can approach a situation
stealthily, tossing tin cans to distract guards and quietly killing or
incapacitating them, but that's about as exotic as it gets.

The furiously paced combat can be thrilling, especially when you start modding your
guns, transforming puny revolvers into freakish weapons of mass destruction. But
whether you're fighting mutants or humans, the AI is never particularly sharp or
reactive, and constantly scrabbling for ammo can be a chore. The guns feel great,
and I love how you can strip enemy weapons and attach the scavenged parts to your
own at a workbench. But the novelty of shooting hordes of crustaceans, bandits, and
mutants soon wears off, and after a while I found myself yearning for more depth.

A new mutant type, the ridiculously named 'humanimals', are zombie-like drones who
rush you in packs, clambering over scenery and occasionally throwing bits of rubble
at you. I think they were going for something similar to the creatures in I Am
Legend, but they're clumsy, slow, and a drudge to kill, rather than some
relentless, savage force to be reckoned with. Most of the mutants are generic,
snarling monsters, and quite boring to fight, but there is one towards the end of
the game that is actually kind of terrifying.