Key Preview Takeaways:
- Metro 2039, very refreshingly, doesn’t hold your hand. It throws you straight into the deep end.
- Gameplay variety was fantastic during my 3-4 hour hands-on; I was rarely doing the same thing for very long.
- Metro 2039 blew me away with its handcrafted hellscapes, intense combat, and attention to detail.
I’ve spent about 3-4 hours with Metro 2039 so far, and it’s already healing me even as the in-game version of me, dubbed The Stranger in this sequel, struggles to breathe through a gas mask whose filters don’t last long, thus requiring me to craft new ones from items scrounged by scouring every last inch of its post-apocalyptic world as the countdown timer on my wristwatch constantly ticks down, threatening to choke me to death if it hits 0:00. In a real world where AI is being shoved down our throats at every corner, from our emails to the customer service reps we interact with, one of my biggest takeaways from Metro 2039 is that even though it’s an apocalypse-ravaged hellscape, every inch of it is very obviously and very painstakingly handcrafted. This franchise always was, of course; this is nothing new.
But still, there’s just something about the way 2039 is hitting for me at this exact moment in time that I needed. It is a game that neither offers nor tolerates any bullsh*t, and I love it for that because said bullsh*t surrounds us in the real world. Metro does not hold your hand. It regularly keeps your blood pressure somewhere between slightly elevated and spiked, and it makes no apologies for it. Its irradiated world is Hell, and it very convincingly conveys that at all times. And in an age where single-player first-person shooters are slowly going extinct because they only make money for their publisher once while multiplayer live-service shooters vie for our time and attention on a daily basis (and often contain lots of bullsh*t, like microtransactions and/or drawn-out gameplay loops), Metro’s single-player-only craftsmanship and attention to detail after my first few hours with it have me already prepared to call it my favorite first-person shooter in a long time.
Deadly Serious
If you’ve played Metro before you’ll certainly be right at home, but even if you’re new to this series, it’s easy enough to get up to speed with. In short, everything is lethal, from the mutated monstrosities on the surface to rival survivors who’ve laid claim to the places you need to get through to the very air you breathe. You are almost never, ever “safe” in Metro 2039. The one place you can’t get killed is where my preview build started out in the Sevastopolskaya Metro Station, which is filled with NPCs and shopkeepers. It feels very alive – a stark contrast to the 180 that happens as soon as you grab your backpack and gun and exit the metro and head to the very dead surface.
There, you are completely and utterly alone. Not literally, as there are mutated freaks abound, from giant maneating rats to jumpy beasts that like to keep their distance and fling barbs from their tails at you to oversized mosquitos who like to get right in your face to huge prehistoric-sized crustaceans who emerge from the waters of the sewers. And, as mentioned, there are plenty of other survivors out there too. Except all of them are hostile – or at least, everyone I met outside of the metro during my hands-on time immediately wanted me dead.
I appreciated being thrown straight into the deep end as soon as I reached the surface. Yes, a map on a crude tablet gave me a general idea of where to go towards my next objective, but beyond that I was on my own to figure out the best path – and to survive along the way. I wandered into a drug store – well, the picked-apart remnan ts of one, obviously – and I checked every nook and cranny for crafting items I could use to make medkits, ammo, and most crucially of all, new gas mask filters. Pressing Y on the keyboard lifts your gun up a little higher so you can clearly see your digital wristwatch, which constantly ticks down the minutes and seconds until your current filter will expire.
I found environmental puzzles tucked away in various places, and felt compelled to try and solve them all because the reward would likely be those precious crafting resources that would well and truly keep me alive. Some of these puzzles utilized the Stranger’s UV light, guiding you to follow clues that were scrawled on walls and floors such that they could only be seen under the purple hue. In my experience, these challenges may have been optional, but they were worth pursuing every single time. Again, it can’t be said enough: Metro 2039 does not mess around. It does not waste your time. There doesn’t seem to be any filler content here. Everything seems to be meticulously considered and implemented.
Makeshift Arsenal
The weapons are something of a puzzle unto themselves. They can all be modified and customized, from their scopes to their hilts to their muzzles and more. At one point fairly early on, I found a double-barrelled sho tgun that I decided to swap out for the single-barrel version I had on me, and it became my go-to gun in the close-quarters “dungeons” I spent much of the latter half of my demo traipsing through. I even found a laser sight to attach to it, which is almost comically pointless on a close-quarters death-dealer like this, but I didn’t have anything better to stick on there, so I figured, “What the heck.”
Oh, and as you may very well have guessed by now, ammo is scarce. You can find and craft different types – everything from rudimentary metal balls to incendiary rounds to armor-piercing machinegun rounds – and you’ll certainly need to. I survived a miniboss fight with a nine-foot-tall mutant and his feral accomplices with so few rounds left on me that I prayed there was nothing else waiting for me for the next little while, because the fight took place in knee-deep sewer water, which meant that I had nowhere I could set my backpack down in order to craft more. (Fortunately, Metro’s game designers took pity on me, and I was indeed given a short reprieve.)
But you also have throwables that help tilt the scales slightly back in your favor. I was quite fond of the knives, as not only can they enable you to stealthily take out regular human enemies without alerting anyone else, but as you’d expect in a game with such stringent resource management, you can retrieve your blades from the corpses of your targets (or the ground if you happen to miss a throw). But as the caliber of foe ramped up as I progressed, the Molotov cocktails started to get a lot more useful.
Variety Is the Spice
Adding to the list of things I love about Metro 2039 so far is its gameplay variety. I was never doing the same thing for very long during my few hours with it, and I applaud it for that. As I mentioned, I started with a rare moment of safety in the metro station before moving topside and having plenty of room to roam while contending with the mutated bestiary I talked about earlier. And as I progressed, I was kept on my toes with a number of different gameplay scenarios.
At one point, I was conveniently left a scoped rifle on the decaying second-story balcony of a building adjacent to a nest of Novoreich members – they’re the bad-guy faction here, under the direction of Fuhrer Hunter, who was only teased in my demo, so I can’t really determine much about the quality of him as a foe, besides the fact that he is very obviously a post-apocalyptic Hitler and therefore I’ll take great pleasure in gunning him and everyone in his ranks down in the final game. Sadly I don’t have any footage of this to show you.
Anyway, I picked up that scoped rifle and started loudly picking off Novoreich scum – they told on themselves by having bright lights attached to their weapons, making things easier for me. Later, in a completely different scenario, I found myself in an abandoned da ycare, where my electronics got jammed in one particularly creepy room, making my skin crawl despite there being nary a living creature around and motivating me to want to get the heck out of there as quickly as possible.
Thankfully, you do get a break from the constant juggling act of crafting and installing new gas mask filters in Metro’s subterranean “dungeons,” at least. The air is clean enough in these to be able to safely remove your gas mask, and in the several I battled through, all favored close-quarters combat, which made me all-too-happy to bust out that double-barrelled shotgun I’d picked up early on. In one of them, I was able to choke out the only upstairs guard without alerting anyone below, and he was conveniently standing (well, slouching now) next to an open air duct that let me creep down silently and in the shadows to the dark main base below, which was teeming with unfriendly humans. I botched my stealth attempt here trying to thread the needle with a thrown knife at a tough angle, and I got discovered. It then became an old-fashioned shootout, in which I was happy to break out Metro’s lean feature from behind cover to expose as little of my body to the baddies as possible.
This was the story of my hands-on time: combat encounters came in many different forms, shapes, and sizes, and I really appreciated that.
Destroyed Beauty
Speaking of appreciation, it will come as no surprise to anyone that’s played a Metro game before that 2039 is, visually speaking, gorgeous. It’s bleak and horrifying, of course, but it’s rendered beautifully. Developer 4A Games’ (read our new interview with them about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed their development approach) proprietary engine is really cooking here, though I should confess that framerate isn’t something I can reasonably report on right now – not just because I was playing a preview build of a game that won’t be out for six months, but also because I was playing it remotely via GeForce Now. So we’ll have to see how it holds up once I can throw my own 5080 at it, rather than the 5080 that was feeding the game to me via the cloud.
I’ve come this far in this preview and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Metro 2039 is offering. Series veterans have no dou bt already been nodding their heads along in satisfaction, while those new to Metro are in for a treat – if the few hours I got to play are any indication. February 2027 was already looking stacked with the first big wave of post-GTA 6 releases, but Metro 2039 just cemented itself on my must-play list for that crowded month.
While you’re here, check out these previews of other big upcoming games we’ve played recently!
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.