Recent reviews by Alcator

This is a problematic game to recommend, because despite its seemingly open-world nature, it is very heavily scripted and woe be unto you if you deviate from that script.

As an example, I managed to avoid the armorer in the first region when he invited me into his chambers, because I wanted to go talk to someone else and then I forgot to visit the armorer. As a result, he did not give me the TIKHAR rifle, which you cannot find anywhere else. He then repeatedly offered me UPGRADES for it, but unfortunately, he never gave me the weapon for which those upgrades were intended, so I had to finish the whole game without a 'silent sniper rifle'. Needless to say, it was very difficult to do.

That said, the game has absolutely stellar atmosphere and immersion. You really do feel like being there, because the view is never taken away from your eyes.

The combat is a bit hardcore, with weapons jamming due to dust or overheating, enemies flanking you and health being very precious and easily lost. But it's at the same time very satisfying when you finally overcome some enemy force.

It's important to play the first two games before diving into this one -- start with the first game (Metro 2033) and only if you like it enough to complete it, proceed to the sequel (Metro Last Light). And, only if you enjoy that one to completion, proceed to Exodus.

Nearing the end of the game after 3 hours.

I played the demo during development and gave some feedback on progression and some sudden jumps in difficulty. It's great to see that in the final product, the developers took many pages from the Portal series and are ramping up difficulty very slowly, providing ample opportunities to learn each new principle and ensuring the player is 'fluent' in it before throwing in some curveballs.

There's apparently also a hint system, but I haven't used it yet, despite being prompted to do so when I got stuck on one particular level.

Very cool non-Euclidean geometry puzzle game, wholeheartedly recommended!

A promising idea realized very poorly.

The ultimate issue of this game is that it doesn't keep track of what your choices were previously and doesn't adjust the "Narrative" depending on your integrity -- despite claiming that Integrity is important.

As an example, there is a series of scenarios where you are in charge of a company's "AI" division, and are repeatedly offered to either cover up the company's errors, or to confess to them. And yet, at the very end of the chain, even if you always chose to act ethically and admit to wrongdoing, the last scenario is about a whistleblower who threatens to go to the MEDIA and reveal everything about you - and you are asked to choose between "Resign in disgrace" or "Kill the whistleblower". I'm sorry, they are going to REVEAL *what* exactly?? I've already admitted publically to everything our company did wrong, so what more is there to reveal and why do I have only these two options??

My expectations for a REMASTER is that it will fix significant problems (bugs, errors in lore etc.). That has to be the bare minimum expectation, otherwise we will never get out of the quagmire that is the current state of gaming.

Sadly, whoever was responsible for this remaster was very clearly not aware of issues of the original game, or not given permission to fix them.
How is it possible that Captain Balahn (giver of 2 quests) still repeats the quest *task* AFTER you complete each of those quests? This was reported back in 2017.

Consequently, this remaster's focus was on graphics.

The game loop, so far, is about backtracking: Press a button, which closes the door behind you and allows you to go forward. Go forward, grab something, bring it back, press the same button, drag the carried thing through the first door. Do this three times and you finish a 'room' and can go even further back, but now the portal to that room serves as a power source.

Over and over and over.

With a slow moving character and very narrow doorways.

So far it's missing any 'wow' effect. Remember when we flung ourselves at high speed in Portal?

Nothing like that here. Even moving platforms are moving really slowly.

This game has a lot of potential.

You begin by quickly fixing up a broken airship ("zeppelin") and using it to visit a few nearby locations to collect resources.

After getting familiar with the controls, you will need to upgrade your airship to be able to fly up, which will allow you to land on higher (and previously inaccessible) platforms with more advanced stuff on them. This repeats a bunch of times, until you reach a point when you finally take a dive into the toxic, infested 'Dust'.

For me, this took about 8 hours.

There is an endless supply of basic materials constantly floating in the air around you, so even if you run out of fuel mid-air, you can quickly harvest enough resources to produce more fuel, and continue on your journey.

Once you make it into the Dust for the first time, there is some potentially challenging combat against two types of moving enemies (before that, there were some easily defeated stationary enemies), which are guarded important resources necessary to progress in the story.

You start working on 'the cure', which may easily take another 10+ hours, requiring multiple incursions into the Dust. Exploration of the Dust is complicated by lack of breathable air, so you need to find some way to replenish oxygen and enlarge your oxygen tanks, to be able to be there; fortunately, there are ways to create endless resupply spots within these areas with a bit of investment.

Your airship can be expanded by adding new rooms and even new and bigger balloons to increase the carry capacity (weight limit); but bigger airships may be harder to steer and especially land on the more challenging locations, so it's a trade-off.

There are already ways to decorate your airship with posters and decorative windows and even furniture and a pet.

The game is visually very cool, the boid-like dust swirling below the airship is pretty cool.

Looking forward for what the future holds!

First impression is not that great -- the ground is littered with things that LOOK like resources, but actually are not. Ice can only be found at one location which is very easy to miss, and it's possible to essentially soft-lock yourself if you migrate away from the initial drop pod and deplete your initial water supply.

There seem to be some new ideas, like the 'crusher' device that you unlock right at the beginning, and which crushes the new types of resources into several random pieces of well-known resources, such as alluminium.

Unfortunately, the problems from the first game, such as the 'terrain prefabs' from which the world is built, and which are often not 'glued' correctly together, persist here as well. Would be really nice if the devs eventually reworked this into proper level geometry that doesn't have holes in the environment.

Will see how it goes further.

So far (1/3 of the way through the game), it's very atmospheric and plays well.

It really feels like an ALIENS game.

So far (~25% in), this looks really great!

Great sequel to the amazing Horizon Zero Dawn. A must-have for everyone who loved the first game.