Physicality is there. Pulling up a map means your character holds a map in real-time. Upgrading your gun means setting your backpack down and unloading materials. Guns need to be regularly cleaned; the first area, Volga, is a snowy wasteland caking your weapons in mud.
I think the game got *worse* the more open it became. For me, Metro 2033 was great for its constraints. Surviving in the tunnels meant fighting through the normalcy of the post-apocalypse. This is now a game about design--its thesis is “making a competent modern open-world game.” I think the highlights so far have been the dark, irradiated chambers. Zombies climbing from the bowels of the earth. Spawning out of sight so you have no idea how many are left to stalk you. Ironically, the game feels more inventive when it works with smaller space.
The throwing weapons upgrade is a masterpiece of nonsense:
The shotgun feels good. I don’t know if it’s actually that unique in its handling, or its effect feels amplified because ammo is so precious. When bullets are scarce, anything with that kind of punch feels incredible. In this game, the standard shotgun is the BFG from Doom.
That being said, I haven’t felt like I’m scraping by. Volga hasn’t pushed me to my limits. Rest points are plenty, healing at these pit stops is unlimited, and the throwing knives are incredibly easy to craft (these are one-hit kills anywhere on an enemy’s body--stealth is a non-issue with these). So far, the wasteland just seems like decoration for modern open-world philosophy: make the player feel good at all times.
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