Review by: Dave VanDyk

Nobody will be better-suited to weather the storm of the nuclear apocalypse when it arrives than the Russians.

Oh sure, you've got your "Pip-Boy" and your "Vault Dweller" and your "Enclave" backing the American team, but those are all just based on fancypants luxuries that your average wasteland wanderer won't really have at his or her disposal. No, what we need is something that provides hard training on how things will really be for the average bloke in this post-apocalyptic era to teach things like how to use a hand-crank generator to keep his flashlight going, or how frantically jabbing the "Use" button during a crucial moment in combat can prevent your arm from being mangled by marauding mutants.

The somewhat hit-and-miss release of STALKER has helped prepare us for these harsh realities, but now our overseas friends have released an all-new spin on things with Metro 2033.

To get the obvious comparisons out of the way first, it'd be easy to describe Metro 2033 as a literal combination of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and STALKER. The game has all the anomalies, mutants and rustic, post-apocalyptic charm of the STALKER franchise with the kind of scripted first-person experience you'd traditionally see in the Call of Duty games. You get a lot of scenes where you' see all sorts of nasty stuff happen to your character from the first person perspective, and even have to deal with the occasional simple quick time event to avoid having your face gnawed off.

The storyline is based on the popular novel by the same name (written by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky). You play as Artyom, a member of one of the many self-contained "Metro" cells that lives under the ruins of Moscow. Having been consumed by an inevitable nuclear conflict, most of the inhabitants of the city have been forced into the expansive underground Metro tunnels as a means of surviving the harsh radiation and intense cold. However, strange mutated beings have begun to overrun the colonies one by one. Fearing for the safety of his own Metro, Atryom sets out into the dark tunnels with the hope of finding a solution to end the threat of the so-called "dark ones" once and for all.