Metro Exodus and Mad Max: How to Punch People in the Apocalypse
Yes, the long road to Punchalla has stretches with no punch or kick to be seen. Whole martial arts deserts. Wastelands of guns, bullets, bows, spells, swords, etc. I travel through these harsh lands when I must because I find some small fighting joy in the journey. Maybe I find a kernel of Kung Fu-like truth in the devotion to a single theme or technique. Or maybe there aren’t any games out just then in which I get to punch things properly, okay?
Metro: Exodus is a game without punching, or is it Metro Exodus? So many colons these days, and this game actually drops the colon in the sequel. Crazy. I played it mostly because it’s a game about the post-apocalypse like Fallout. And as I stated in a previous blog, I love crawling around the empty devastated wasteland. Metro Exodus has that going for it. Plus, unlike Fallout 76, it has a sort of deep engaging story. You spend whole maps on a train just talking to people and I didn’t even want to punch any of them. That is a storytelling success of sorts.
The guns in Metro Exodus feel like cobbled-together things you would find in the post-apocalypse, and none of them are mutated. Yet. The Metro world in general is supposed to feel more realistic than Fallout. No crazy retro 50s style, no tongue-in-cheek corporate humor, just nuclear-bombed-out Russia. Radiation so real you have to wear a constantly-breaking gas mask in order to just breathe.
The open zones are great too. Unlike the previous games, you no longer just crawl through an endless hallway from one station to the next in the titular Moscow metro. You get to explore Russia and get into all sorts of trouble. Though you don’t get to go back to zones you’ve cleared so it’s not really an open world. I suppose that’s the trade-off with having a story that centers around taking a relaxing train ride with your best bro buddies and survivalist wife.
The thing that bothers me the most about the story is the presentation of language, but I have this issue with movies and shows in general. Namely, Russian people are speaking English with Russian accents. I get that what we’re getting is the translation of what they’re saying, but why would the translated English voices have Russian accents? It just sounds like everyone is speaking English as a second language like they know you, an American, are watching them and they’re just being polite. But English is the very language of the people who bombed their country and killed millions. I don’t think the people of the Metro would want anything to do with English.
And these thoughts kind of break the immersion for me. I want to be there in the scene, caring that my virtual wife is dying from breathing in toxic fumes at an abandoned ammunition dump. But all I can think about is that it sounds weird that everyone talks to me in English with a Russian accent when my character is supposed to be Russian. Then there’s one character who is an American who speaks this translated Russian in English with an American accent. What am I even supposed to think about that? Just do the voices in Russian and give me subtitles. Maybe I even learn to pick up a word or dva, nyet?
Eh, what can you do, comrade? So, I shot some bad guys and some monsters while I crawled the wasteland thinking about how long my story wife has left before that cough she has throughout the whole game gets bad enough we have to crawl through some abandoned city to find the medicine she needs. The monsters were the usual zombies and rat people mostly. There were some flying bat people like Fallout 76. I think Metro did these first, so it was Fallout that was being unoriginal. But missing were the weird psychic “Dark Ones” from the previous Metro games. I liked the weird unseen psychic bad guys, though the visions and headaches they would throw at you were annoying.
The most interesting monsters in Metro Exodus were also the simplest. If you didn’t go in running and gunning in the desert level, you would find zombies who covered their skin with sand, just standing against the walls of sand-covered burned-out buildings. You really had to look to spot them and then you could see them breathing slowly. Pretty freaky.
What was blatantly, glaringly missing was any kind of real melee weapons or fist weapons. I mean if I wound up in the real post-apocalypse, the first thing I would do is find a weapon to swing at zombies. I think that living in gun-crazy America we get this impression that guns will be everywhere when the apocalypse hits, but guns require constant cleaning and maintenance and bullets have to be made with specialized equipment. You won’t be able to make some from stuff in your backpack like in Metro Exodus. Finding a gun in the post-apocalypse will be great, but you shouldn’t be relying on it. I would have really liked an iron bar to swing at zombies in Metro Exodus. And Great Spirit of Marx forbid I weld together some scrap onto my gloves so I can punch things properly.
That’s what I did in the Mad Max game that came out a few years ago. That game understood that ammo would be rare in the post-industrial wasteland and you would actually have to punch things to make your way in dusty Australia. I enjoyed the bullet economy so much in Mad Max, I played it all the way through twice even though the story was lacking. Just writing about it now makes me want to re-download it and climb back into my Magnum Opus and just drive into a sandstorm. Mad Max was one of the few PC games that did driving well. Not only that, when a sandstorm started up, and they always did when I was raiding some convoy, I felt like I was driving through Mad Max Fury Road.
Sometimes I wonder about the people who make truly great games and what happens to them. I read that the director of Fury Road, George Miller, asked his wife, an accomplished editor, to edit it. She had never edited an action movie before and so she made it seem unique and unforgettable. Were there people like this who made the Mad Max game unique and unforgettable, at least to me? Do they still work at the same developer or did they go on to do other great things?
That’s the thing about video games, you can’t really follow a great director or writer like in films and books. Games are a collaborative process that often require more than one visionary. There are some out there like Hideo Kojima, but I’ve never fully played a Kojima game yet. I worry I’m not cool or enlightened enough to get what’s going on in one of his games. Will I pass the metaphysical test of a Kojima story? I can’t say yet. Maybe if he makes one about a lone wanderer on their way to an imagined nirvana of martial prowess, I’ll have to attempt it. When that day comes, I’ll place my copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary under my mouse pad and give it my best.
Mad Max was one of these games that made me want to try to give it my best. The reflexes-based reactionary combat wasn’t easy (at least for an old turned-based RPGer like myself), but I mastered it and looked forward to breaking into the next desert fastness to punch the dusty-yet-somehow-oily-and-grimy bad guys into submission. I don’t even think there were any monsters in this apocalyptic wasteland, but I didn’t miss them. Hand-to-hand combat was all I needed. Maybe a couple of shotgun blasts to even the odds a little.
The story in Mad Max kind of peters out when you get to the end. The third act feels like it was cut short for budget reasons, which is a shame because up to that point, the game was great. I could have easily sunk another hundred hours into exploring a world twice the size, punching my way through dune after dune. Maybe they’ll make a sequel game when George Miller makes one to Fury Road.
There’s something about having a vehicle that really makes an open-world game feel big. Like it’s just too big to walk across. I also like the idea that it’s a mobile basecamp from which I can launch my adventures into the next ruined factory/ancient dungeon. It’s not that I need the trunk space for my fists, it’s the old American Easy Rider promise of freedom on the open road. A vast land of possibility before me, where anything can happen. The only way it could be better is if I had a spaceship and could travel from alien world to alien world.
There are games that do this like Mass Effect and The Outer Worlds, but what we need is a post-galactic-apocalypse game in which you pilot your cobbled-together junk ship from one devastated world to another. Call it Mad Effect or something. The story can be that some hyperspace communication technology drives the whole galaxy mad, turning a civilization that spans thousands of worlds into one full of mindless violent zombies and zombie-adjacent creatures (for variety). Only a few are immune to the effects of the maddening hyperbeacon. Maybe it turns out that this tech was supposed to be some telepathic news channel that was going to bring only the “truth” to the whole galaxy. How’s that for a tie-in to modern reality. Anyway, all that is gone, and you, the lone wanderer roam space looking for parts to keep your ship and your cyborg fists operational.