Dancing girls with improbable breast physics do their thing and hoodlums scour the docks, shaking down whoever they can. A soldier strums a guitar while a pair of civilians bicker with an officious guard. An elderly man makes shadow puppets to entertain a gang of kids, but none recognise the pre-apocalypse animals he's describing. Each station looks incredible, but they are essentially galleries, and each cluster of people in them a separate exhibit, triggered one after the other as you follow the prescribed route. It's here that 4A go to town on the scripting. The only places where mankind still thrives are the underground stations, each its own semiautonomous city-state. It all feels rather like you aren't meant to be there вЂ“ which is entirely the point. The toppled skyline of Moscow has a grim sort of majesty to it, but it's colonised by a bloodthirsty ecosystem that harries your every step, ripped at by winds, whipped by rain and crumbled into pools of irradiated slurry. Things aren't much cheerier above ground. 'Metro is, I found, rarely as scary as it is sad.' Metro is, I found, rarely as scary as it is sad. It starts to lose its shock: death becomes an all-pervading force, a simple, grim inevitability. There are so many, animal and human, and in so many varied states of exquisitely studied decomposition. The austere militarism of a nuclear bunker segues into the grimly functional tube network and the art deco opulence of the stations вЂ“ all now rotting or reclaimed by nature.Дeath is everywhere вЂ“ I can only imagine that the developers, 4A Games, have an entire department dedicated to corpses. Groans, mutters, creaks, clanks and drips ripple up and down the long black tunnels. The echoing warren of tunnels creates a powerful and oppressive feeling of enclosure and decay: lights sputter and surge, concrete walls crumble or run with water. However, if nothing else, this story is a conduit for delivering the intoxicating, forbidding Metro itself вЂ“ and that's worth the price of admission. You do get a sidekick every now and again who is worth his weight in dialogue, but even these characters are lightly sketched. The overall arc of Artyom's story is, oddly, the least thrilling thing about it вЂ“ the plot beats are predictable and Artyom himself is a bit of an empty shell. It's an incredibly well-fleshed fiction, and Last Light's most tremendous success is the way that it communicates this world, visually and narratively.

Nazis and Communists have carved out portions of the railway system for themselves, one establishing a Fourth Reich bent on eradicating mutation, and the other the Red Line: a literal line of track that bisects the entire subway system.

Worst of all, other human factions tussle over the scant resources, or vie for Metro-wide domination. 'Human factions tussle over the scant resources, or vie for Metro-wide domination' Human existence here is precarious, and even a short trip between pockets of civilisation feels suitably dangerous: dereliction and nuclear destruction have left the tunnels in a bit of a shabby state, while gruesome mutants stalk the black halls and the sad, shattered city above is haunted by things even weirder and more worrisome still. What then follows is a nightmare version of Mornington Crescent, taking Artyom on a circuitous round-trip through the desolate tunnels of the Moscow subway system, along underground rivers, into military bunkers and other even darker places. Because of the stigma attached to being a telepathic death beast, not everyone is convinced of their benevolence, and when one is discovered to have survived the holocaust, you're dispatched to kill it. Secondly, Artyom has just used the missiles within D6 to commit genocide, obliterating a race of benign mutants who had the poor luck of being 12-foot-tall wormy-mouthed psychic ape-monsters whose mere presence causes men to die in terror and pain. Two important things have happened: with Artyom's help the Order has located and taken control of D6, an experimental weapons facility likely to become the envy of the Metro's other warring factions.

You once again play Artyom, now a newly minted member of the Order вЂ“ a sort of subterranean Night's Watch, formed from ex-Spetsnaz soldiers. Set in the nuclear-shielded Moscow subway system following a devastating global war, Last Light's story picks up where Metro 2033's ended. 'It describes humanity with a degree of success that few games of any genre achieve.'

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