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This is one of those titles that stuck with me long after I finished it and that I kept thinking about for several days.
The game is set 2 years after the events of the previous chapter.
Our protagonists, Artyom, Anna, Miller and some former Spartans, tired of life underground and after discovering that there are other survivors living on the surface, embark on a journey on board a train in search of a place where they can settle a colony and start a new life outside the metro.
This "exodus" will mean that throughout the storyline we will visit a variety of different places, each characterized by its own peculiarities. The bombings occurred about 25 years earlier and therefore a large part of the territories are still highly irradiated, inhospitable, infested with mutants or in any case difficult to inhabit.
The game will let us discover many small settlements, each of which, following the wars and the absence of a central government, has had different events and has evolved and adapted to the circumstances as best it could.
This allows for a very varied narrative that is free from the setting of the tunnels, which bored me a bit after Last Light. And towards the end, when we’ll have to return to another subway and visit its tunnels, we will discover that even there events took a very different turn compared to what happened under Moscow.
Initially I didn't appreciate the first "open" level (The Volga), coming from the linear gameplay of the previous chapters I found it a bit distracting. However, once I got past the first adaptation phase, the game hooked me. In fact, it is not so much the gameplay that popped, but rather the various stories that we will gradually discover. Each chapter is somewhat comparable to one of the Fallout vaults, and so the thing I found most exciting was trying to understand what happened and how it got to the current situation.
The environmental narration also helps a lot in this, very carefully crafted, full of visual clues as well as the classic fragments of diaries scattered around. All this captured me and immersed me in the stories, I felt right there, sometimes inside and sometimes alongside Artyom, while I explored a settlement inhabited by cannibals, a desert inspired by Mad Max and governed by the "Baron" (Immortan Joe?), or even a forest populated by pirates and beast-men who live in the trees…
All the characters have endured extremely hard stories, and are the often tragic fruit of their experiences. Despite everything at the end of each episode, however dramatic, there sometimes remains a glimmer of hope, perhaps reflecting the vision of Dmitry Glukhovsky (not having read the novels I can't say for sure, but I can certainly say that I felt like to read them while playing this title).
To all this I would add that aliens are not present in the main plot, unlike the previous chapters, and this makes it in my opinion much more linear and simple to follow, and ultimately I appreciated it much more than that of 2033 and Last Light.
Speaking of pure gameplay, however in this chapter we will have more freedom of movement thanks to the introduction of semi-open world hubs, where in addition to being able to decide whether to have a stealth or more aggressive approach, sometimes we will be able to choose the order in which to face the objectives.
This might be a bit reminiscent of the immersive sim genre, although in reality everything will be much simpler and more linear. The result, in my opinion, is quite balanced and enjoyable, and contributes to immersion in the general atmosphere.
Moving on to the graphics section, I must say that I also found this to be exceptional. I played the version with Ray Tracing and I found everything really well done, non-repetitive and with great attention to detail. As already mentioned, the environmental storytelling is really effective, also thanks to the beautiful graphics. The artistic direction is excellent, all the settings had a strong visual impact on me, without ever boring me, really managing to immerse myself in the atmosphere.
The same thing I can say about the sound, whose well-crafted effects amplify even more the emotions gradually transmitted by the environment, the tension of walking alone inside radioactive tunnels full of corpses or in a sandstorm. The soundtrack is also excellent, discreet and effective.
In conclusion, a game that I approached because I felt the need for a bit of a post-apocalyptic “fix” and which definitely exceeded all expectations, leaving me more than satisfied, and above all intrigued to finally read the novels on which it is based. Highly recommended!