Halo has always been a bastion of difficult shooter land. Throw on "Legendary" difficulty and you'll be dying every 5 feet, but this is the wrong way to go about it. You can't just make the enemies stronger and the player weaker and say, "BAM, tough game." It's not challenging, it just becomes a grind. A masochistic jaunt into controller breaking territory. When you finish the game on harder difficulty, you're not that much better at the game per say you just know where all the places are where you can hide and wait for your health to regenerate. CoD has this same problem with it's "Veteran" Mode. Half-Life gets a bit better but there's a problem with that too. The way the game is designed, with scripted encounters, upping the difficulty just makes you die faster and the enemies slower. You have to fight these people, there's not getting around it. The indie scene does have DayZ, which I still haven't played because I'm waiting for the standalone version that everyone keeps saying is coming out, but that's not really here nor there. But there is one AAA title that is genuinely difficult in the correct ways. Metro 2033.
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| And you thought Nazis were all you had to worry about |
Now you probably have heard of this game, but I find that not many people actually played it. It wasn't really advertised correctly and, as a result, it kind of slipped under the radar back when it was released in 2010. Also the PS3 version never came along, but at least it wasn't PC this time around. I played Metro 2033 back in 2011, and it was pretty good. Good atmosphere, interesting characters, good story telling and generally engrossing. It recently came up in the THQ Humble Bundle so I decided to give it another go, this time with the DLC I somehow missed the first time around. And what a DLC it was.
The DLC didn't seem to add much. It added a "Ranger" mode to the difficulty selection and a new weapon to the game that I didn't bother to grab and it seems as though that was my only chance to grab it. But what really got me excited was the Ranger difficulties, especially Ranger Hardcore. Ranger Hardcore disables the entire HUD, disables crosshairs, makes ammo incredibly scare and turns you into a glass skeleton covered with old paper bags, but this also happens to the enemies. One to two bullets from either side and it's pretty much fatal. This is how you ramp up difficulty.
The game is challenging but not a grind. Enemy encounters now require careful planning to avoid wasting a ton of ammo or getting you killed almost instantly. But the game lets you dodge most of the enemies if you pay attention and doesn't penalize you for it. Sneaking through gets you everything blasting through would, but you get to save your ammo. Stealth is now the name of the game.
And aside from that, the game becomes overwhelmingly immersive. There's no HUD elements to break you out of the game, you start to pay real close attentions to random sounds, you explore everywhere and the game actually becomes tense and unnerving knowing that at any second that guard could turn around and that's it for poor Artyom. The game adds to this with no manual saves, only a check pointing system which may seem like a terrible idea, but it adds to the tension. Long gone are the days of "I'll just quick save and try this." No dice, learn to adapt or you're retying this section. The levels on the surface are even more tense than they were in the normal run because filters now last a third as long as they used to.
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| A view outside |
But you don't have to be a hard game nut to really enjoy the hell out of this game. The setting is just perfect. Metro captures post-apocalyptica in a way I haven't seen before, the destruction seems so, complete. The weapons, the way you buy equipment, the level design, everything has a huge amount of detail to it and the game has an excellent way of showing and not telling. And, the game is terrifying in the best possible way. Only Amnesia has gotten this much of a rise out of me before and the higher difficulties just add to the helpless feeling.
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| You won't forget this tunnel. And, no, that's not a graphics glitch, the shadow is supposed to be there. |
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| There's something horribly unsettling about seeing these dolls everywhere |
This game did manage to get enough attention for a sequel which I am anxiously awaiting, but don't miss out on this game, it's a hell of a ride. I would highly suggest headphones and a dark room for the maximum effect though.
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| He's just going to keep staring at you until you play this game |
