Metro 2033

Based on a Russian novel of the same name, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter that excels in atmosphere and worldbuilding, providing a tense and memorable experience due to its striking, stress-inducing setting. However, the game’s bare-bones story, with its paper-thin characters and a noble but naïve anti-war message, ultimately rings hollow.

The world of Metro 2033 is its selling point; there’s no doubt about that. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic Russia, where people have been driven underground by hordes of devilish monsters and demons. They live in the subway, with scarce resources, and are under constant attack from creatures and other desperate humans. While the surface is radioactive, the underground tunnels are dark and dangerous: there’s no safe haven for anyone here, no place to properly rest and breathe.

The protagonist is Artyom, a young Russian who is tasked with delivering a report about some mysterious beings called “the Dark Ones” to a man named Miller in the Polis, their largest underground station. To that end, he must travel through the tunnels of Moscow’s metro system and escape the horrible creatures that roam the place.

Artyom’s world is claustrophobic and tense. The protagonist’s time in each station is brief, but still enough to convey the desperation of his people. Ammo is used as currency, for example, depicting how violence became so necessary for survival that it was injected into their economic system. Hospital beds are always occupied, and people are often seen in the barely-lit corridors of the stations looking unsuccessfully for their loved ones. We can find a man in a bar telling his friends how his baby’s first words were “fire”: his companions cheer, believing this to mean that the child will grow to be a soldier, but the man explains how he has frequent nightmares, where he wakes up screaming to his men to “open fire” – and they all go back to their drinks, now in silence.

These are traumatized characters living in a harsh and unforgiving environment, but we can still witness some small bits of happiness here and there, such as when a woman laughs at the creative way a man flirts with her: it’s a mundane display of joy that sticks out in that somber world.

The world of Artyom is much more fleshed out than he is, however. The protagonist lacks a personality of his own, being that type of character who is nothing but ordinary until his routine is shaken up by an unfortunate incident that propels him to action. As Artyom explains in his narration, “Life was never easy in the tunnels, but it was our home. There was comfort in its routines, in seeing the same people day after day, but since the mutant attacks had escalated, fear ruled the station.”

However, Artyom never manages to function effectively as the player’s surrogate in the Metro since, unlike us, he’s too familiar with its culture and people. And he’s not that compelling as a proper character either, being too reactive and flat to make an impression. In cutscenes, Artyom barely speaks, leaving all of his development to his narration at the beginning of each mission, the journals we can find along the way, and a bit of art direction: his room, for instance, has a bunch of postcards of the old world, displaying his desire to travel and for things to return to normal.

The people that he meets don’t fare much better in terms of development. They have no personal struggles or remarkable traits, being all the same type of character: the hardened soldier who doesn’t fear monsters but has a fair chance of ending up being killed by them nonetheless. And they have little screen time, too, never taking long to perish at the claws of the creatures or at the hands of other people.

This indeed creates a tense atmosphere, where everyone can die at any time, but it also means Artyom’s companions never have a chance to stick around for too long to actually leave a lasting impression on us. Their passage in Artyom’s life is too brief, and so their deaths carry no weight: although Artyom remarks how losing his friends shakes him to the core, we are left with no reason to feel the same. Eventually, then, all these characters start to blur together, and their names fade away: any player who manages to remember who Bourbon and Pavel were by the end of the game deserves a silver trophy for the achievement.

There are only two side characters that stand out. The first is Khan, who has a supernatural aura around him: he knows too much about the creatures, especially the so-called “Dark Ones,” almost as if he were connected to them in some way. He seems to know things he shouldn’t and to be able to do things other people can’t. The other standout character is Hunter, but mainly because he functions as a counterpoint to Khan: he shoots monsters on sight and advises Artyom to do so as well, showing no hesitation.

Khan and Hunter are opposites. They both seem indestructible, and they both help Artyom achieve his goals, but their methods couldn’t be further apart. When asked about the Dark Ones, Hunter’s answer is simple, “My Order has a motto: If it’s hostile, you kill it.” Khan, meanwhile, after a tense encounter with a strange life form, gives Artyom a different piece of advice: “It’s not any more ‘evil’ than, say… fire. It all depends on your point of view. Try to get a better understanding of things before you make your judgment.” In other words, Hunter pushes the protagonist to kill, encouraging him to shoot the monsters down mercilessly to protect his people, while Khan argues that Artyom should try to understand what he’s fighting against before making rash decisions.

The game’s main theme is directly related to this conflict. Metro 2033 presents a pessimistic view of humanity, depicting a species that keeps killing its own rather than focusing on the alien threat outside. Some horror stories use monsters as a common enemy that unites warring people against a bigger foe, but the monsters in Metro have never stopped humanity from waging war against itself. Artyom himself puts it in simple terms: “Even the apocalypse didn’t stop us from killing one another over ideology.”

The derogatory use of the word “ideology” here is more than telling; it’s the key to understanding the overall narrative: it reveals how the game frames “politics” in a negative light, being treated as something abstract and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. In other words, the demon threat serves to highlight how foolish people are for keeping themselves apart for inconsequential things like… ideology.

The problem of this stance, then, becomes clear when Artyom eventually comes across… fascists. In Metro 2033’s world, Communist and Nazi settlements are fighting each other underground. The story never goes deep into how this happened, for to explain how their doctrines can survive in a demon-infested world is not one of the game’s priorities. Its only concern is in demonizing both ideologies and not because of their content, but simply because they are, by nature, ideologies: the game rarely touches on what each one of them stands for, pointing out their particular problems or cruelties, resorting instead to a simple “if it is politics, it is bad” attitude.

The issue here is that when Artyom complains about how foolish it is to kill one another over ideology while he’s surrounded by Nazis, he’s actually saying that it is foolish to fight other people just because they think you and your family are all subhuman and should be exterminated. The narrative doesn’t make exceptions in its “every war is bad” message, which should even include the mutated monsters and the Dark Ones if Khan has any say on the matter. In Metro 2033, ideology is simply not a thing worth fighting for. The game is basically saying “Forget politics, let’s just all love each other,” without realizing that this is in itself a political message – and a very disingenuous one at that: just try loving and embracing a Nazi – while being from a targeted minority – and see what happens.

Artyom also builds a false symmetry between Nazis and Communists that is sure to make a shiver run down any historian’s spine, telling us how he couldn’t tell them apart: “The Reich is supposed to be a complete opposite of the Red Line… But why does it look so similar?” he ponders. Yes, Artyom, it’s indeed easy to confuse both groups if you don’t care about unimportant things such as ideology. It’s easy to sit on the fence if you blind yourself to what’s happening on both sides and, even more importantly, if you blind yourself as to the why. But Artyom doesn’t care about any of that; he sees “poverty and hunger,” and the “rambling of the politicians” on both sides, and that’s all that matters for him to put them in the same nonsensical basket.

It’s symptomatic, then, that later on, Artyom makes an absurd comment about the Communist settlements and the Reich: “They are places that deem culture, art and science useless,” he says, basically disregarding the fact that culture, art, and science were crucial tools used in both the Nazi Germany and the USSR to manipulate the people (used, really, by any smart government whatsoever since the dawn of time). Artyom is lost in a brutal world that he doesn’t understand, one that he’s not even willing to try to understand, since the underground stations of Metro 2033 are the place where political nuance goes to die.

The missions that focus on these subjects, such as the one that puts Artyom in a Nazi settlement in the middle of a fierce firefight, are the worst parts of the game by far. But it’s not only because of their problematic political commentary, as their level design makes them devolve into a cluttered mess, where stealth is rarely a viable option: these levels inevitably turn into shallow, repetitive shooting galleries where we shoot one bad guy after another.

In short, Metro 2033 would have been a much better game if it had thought more carefully about what it was doing with its political commentary, or ditched the discussion altogether and focused only on the survival horror aspect of its source material.

After all, if the game falters when it comes to its narrative, it excels at building an oppressive atmosphere. The underground tunnels are dark and eerie, rife with spider webs and hellish monsters. There are tunnels no one dares to enter and others that are haunted by a dangerous and inscrutable light. The survival horror aspect of Metro 2033 is well done for the most part, with ammo and resources being scarce, while the monsters are quick and ferocious, making each encounter a frightening experience. While Artyom’s weapons are clunky and slow to fire and reload, the creatures are also agile and relentless, often coming in great numbers to overwhelm him.

When the protagonist visits the surface, he must also keep an eye on his air filters, for even breathing is deadly in Moscow: searching the scattered bodies for more filters becomes essential for survival, giving a tense time limit to our stay on the surface. His oxygen mask can break too, and the blood of the people Artyom kills at close range splashes all over it, obscuring our vision, creating some impactful moments during the more hectic fights.

Unfortunately, there are also several shooting galleries spread throughout the game that break this horror atmosphere with action-oriented sections. And there’s the middle part of the game, the section involving the Communists and the Nazis, that drags on for a while, even offering two “turret missions” back-to-back, whose tone feels totally out of place.

In the end, Metro 2033 manages to build a strong atmosphere, but its underdeveloped story, marred by a plethora of shallow characters and discussions, leads to some questionable political commentary: Metro 2033 is much like your cousin Josh, the one who keeps saying he hates politics but never shuts up about it, who claims to be neither right-wing nor left-wing but always votes for the same side, and who, when offered strawberry ice cream and feces ice cream in a desert will always answer, “Well, they’re all made with milk and I don’t really like strawberry that much.” Even though we gotta admit, despite all his problems, Josh is indeed really good at aura farming.

April 15, 2026.