Metro: Last Light preview: The Underground Man

[Administrator]

Nixies are a wonderful piece of retro tech: they're a means of creating digital displays that relies on funny little glass vacuum tubes. Fragile and captivating, it's hard to look at this ingenious relic of the 20th century without wishing they'd caught on - even though they'd presumably have meant that we'd all be making weekly trips to the local horologist. Eccentrics like Steve Wozniak have Nixie tube wristwatches, at any rate - and in Metro: Last Light, so will you, the gadget's bright, rather spindly meshed lettering linked to the internal clock on your PC or console. Whatever happens, there's that digital readout, staring up at you from the wrist of Artyom, the series' sharp-shootin' protagonist, as he ventures through this strange, frightening jury-rigged world where yesterday and tomorrow have collided painfully.
The Nixie model replaces Artyom's old wristwatch: the more traditional dial-and-hands-based number that Metro 2033 veterans relied on to count down the time until they were in need of a new air filter as they explored Moscow's irradiated topside, or to clue them in to how well hidden they were during stealth sections. The new watch does all of that too, of course, and when it comes to stealth, it's a lot simpler and - hopefully - less frustrating with it. In Last Light, a blue lamp on the watch's face tells you whether you're visible or not. It's binary. Tidy stuff.
That watch will be your consistent companion through 4A Games' sequel, and it's a fixed point at which two of the series' key themes come together, too. One is stealth, and it was front and centre during a recent developer playthrough of the fiercely pretty PC version over at THQ's UK HQ. The other lies with the Nixies and that loveably nuts-and-bolts approach to knackered old gear they represent. Metro's world is a dangerous scrapheap where everything useful has been cobbled together from mis-matched parts: a place in which years of living in the subways of Moscow after a nuclear attack have lead technology in strange trajectory.
Read more…


More...