In a shooter landscape increasingly populated with sprawling openworld environments and RPG excess, it's sometimes refreshing to find a game willing to rein it all in and focus on nailing the "tightly crafted" experience. No tedious grinding, no pointless padding or waffling generic characters, just an absorbing episodic journey peppered with memorable set-pieces, an interesting cast and ever-present narrative intrigue. It certainly worked for Half-Life, so Metro 2033's combination of this cinematic approach with the post-apocalyptic dystopia of Fallout certainly has an obvious allure.

Based on the best-selling Dmitry Glukovsky novel of the same name, Metro 2033 sees you playing as Artyom, an unlikely hero born in the days before the apocalyptic events of two decades prior. Forced to scratch out a desperate subterranean battle for survival in the sprawling tendrils of the Moscow underground metro network, it soon transpires that Artyom has developed a unique immunity to the strange psychic attacks by the 'Dark Ones' which prowl the tunnels.Sent out on a desperate mission to warn the remnants of mankind about this menace, he gets rather more than he bargained for. Facing a barrage of vicious mutants, merciless bandits, Russian Neo-Nazis, and a routinely inhospitable environment, every step of the journey is fraught with the kind of ever-present danger normally associated with an ill-advised night out in Barking.Leaving the austere surroundings of his 'home' station, you depart with little more than a gas mask, torch, hand charger, compass, map case and a selection of battered weaponry (think pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenades) and home-made ammo. Exploring the fetid tunnels and abandoned stations en-route to your destination, Metro 2033 settles into a groove that's a curious blend of run-and-gun and survival horror.Perhaps the most striking element of the game is the atmosphere it creates, aided no end by 4A's mastery of every audio trick in the book. The rising, claustrophobic dread from hearing your own suppressed breathing and heartbeat inside the gas mask fills every tentative step into the inky gloom with mortal danger. Elsewhere, the permanent sense of unhinged malevolence from screeching discordant strings, clanking bells and crying children make it impossible to stop for a moment and gather your thoughts. It's almost preferable just to keep moving, to block out the otherworldly hum that emanates from some indefinable noxious corner of the netherworld you inhabit.With resources in extremely short supply, the need to manually scavenge and loot every corpse you come across becomes an essential part of the proceedings. Being so hard to come by, military grade ammo has become this subterranean economy's currency of choice. You can either jealously hoard it for your own use as a more powerful alternative to the rather craptastic home-made ammo scattered around, or risk trading them in for upgrades and more powerful weaponry.