Lol. Well I’ll be surprised if the guy making home delivery in Moscow is not Russian himself.

Yeah well HOLY CRAP. As some of you know I recently got notified of my Oculus Rift being almost ready to ship and got excited, because hey, I’ll be able to play it sometime in June! Well I just an email with mail order number and there it says to get into my hands TODAY because all other stages are already passed and they just didn’t mail me the order number before.

HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP.

If that’s true, I’m gonna cry when the delivery guy gets here.

I wanted to say that you can play this one right away, but that just wouldn’t be true. It connects pretty heavily with the story of the first game, so you’ll miss out a lot if you don’t at least know what it was all about and how it ended.

It’s not even that you know. It is that bleak and depressing in many, many places, they just show it…wrong, I don’t know. Most of the time anyway.

Lol, not exactly, but it looks exactly the same – just a bit cleaner. And I was mostly talking about the streets actually, like on the first picture in my post – I can feel houses outside my window looking that way already. It’s just that usually Russia in games/movies feels and looks totally fake, to me anyway.

It IS amazing, not just in visuals :)

Well, finished Last Light today. Took me 8.4 hours on Ranger difficulty which is nice, since I finish most modern FPS in under 6 hours.
The game totally did impress me way more than the original. I can relate this to Dead Space 2 – they improved in every possible way over the 1st one. This metro was longer, scarier, better looking, much better optimized, more fun, and very importantly – less metro. Towards the end of the game you barely stay inside, going to the surface very often, where gameplay changes to something much more open and engaging. The atmosphere is still absolutely top-notch, one of the best in all the FPS games at the very least, along with a world that’s interesting to explore. The world outside and inside feels EXACTLY like Moscow which is where I live all my life, so I really can tell, it’s fucking impressive.

Addition of new guns was nice, but most important thing for me was improved customization – I used same two guns I got at the beginning for the rest of the game only changing once. Silenced AK-74 with red dot sight for times when shit got real and silenced revolver for stealth and hunting. At the end I simply replaced AK-74 with AK-12, using same customizations. These two totally got me covered, and I barely felt need for something different, only during close encounters with large packs of mutants who are fast and don’t give two craps about AK unless shot at the head which you can’t hit with their movement speed, so I often ran out of ammo taking on lots of them at once. Shotgun would be perfect there, shame you can’t carry 3 weapons.

One thing I didn’t like was dumb AI – if you are in “shadow” area – you can’t be seen, even if enemy is standing or passing right next to you, bodies can’t be seen as well. Enemies never notice their friends die with very few exceptions. 90% of the game I passed areas, even very complicated ones, on first try, without ever raising alarms or making a single noise, which feels kind of cool, but also shows for how easy it is. Meh, maybe it’s me, but I somehow doubt that. Due to being stealthy I also missed out on most of the action, but when it did happen, it was fucking glorious. I mean it. The game probably has the most visually and gameplay-wise satisfying shooting sequences I’ve seen in years. When shit hits the fan, it’s fast, ugly, and very dynamic. Felt very realistic.

Story felt kind of flat and rushed at first, but became fine towards the end. You apparently can also get different endings depending on some decisions you make (yes, there are some to make) during the game, and how you play in general. I have to investigate in this since I don’t even know which ending I got myself, didn’t really feel good or bad. Due to lack of a tutorial I only realised that you can knock enemies out with E without killing them with V up close, which probably made me a real bad guy – I slit everyone’s throat at first.
Don’t really have much more to add – you’ll love it if you loved the first game, or enjoy atmospheric FPS games or simply good-looking ones. Will throw in a bunch more screenshots now, all watchable in 1080p and with comments:

Before…

…and after.

That moment.

Missiles hit.

The life before…

Armory.

Exploring the darkness.

Death from the shadow.

Final stand

Straight up 60 fps maxed out in 1080p, without SSAA though since I don’t see any picture improvement with it yet fps drops to 20-40. I’m rocking GTX 680.

I just can’t get enough Last Light. The game keeps sucking me in more and more the longer I play it. Still haven’t finished the thing. Made a batch of screenshots, figured I’d share here, hope you guys don’t mind! Added some comments on hover.

Better get me two right away.

Yeah, that’s my main concern so far. I tend to get headaches while playing certain games, even right after I start sometimes, and I also tend to get dizzy from 3D, so Rift is a real gamble for me. Hopefully I’ll at least be able to use it without such problems after I get used to it.

I get a headache after playing lots of games rather quick, due to FOV I guess, but luckily Half-Life never gave me such problems, although I did hear about lots of people who can’t really play it because of that. I really do hope that Rift won’t give me problems since I also tend to get a headache from 3D, and here we have a combination of those :(

So, after being one of the first to back Oculus Rift on Kickstarter and waiting it to get here since freaking October, after all the delays I finally got an email yesterday saying that mine’s gonna ship in the next batch. I’m excited again!

Today’s email from them also said that Valve “has officially released beta Oculus support for their groundbreaking classic, Half Life 2 (including Episode 1, Episode 2 and OSX support)”! Although I knew people hacked Half-Life to work with it already, the fact that Valve made such an option available themselves means that my hopes weren’t for nothing – they are actually trying to implement Rift in their games and are even making it available to public! I honestly couldn’t be more happy about it. Back in the day I was just dreaming of this thing supporting anything but DooM 3 when I get it, now it doesn’t support DooM but got tons of other titles working with it. Man, I’m just excited.

Stuck with reading rather than writing for a while.

With the game finally being out here in Russia today, I played a few hours of Metro: Last Light. It’s pretty freaking awesome so far, even though stealth is really simple and too unrealistic at times. I also love the performance – without SSAA but everything else maxed out in 1080p I’m getting a stable 60fps with GTX 680. With many new games giving me less than 30 this was a real pleasure.

Oh, and I armed and blew up 4 MCOMs myself that round.

Well, been a while since I posted stuff here, so I hope nobody minds. Played this awesome rush attack on Metro just two days ago, and it’s like, the best rush attack you’ll see this month. We completely turned the game around on the second MCOM after arming and blowing it up while having 0 tickets left, from there on the game was just insanely intense.

Even if not for that, moment at around 12:25 is worth watching! I sneaked to MCOM and ended up wreaking havoc there killing 13 and arming it twice in about 40 seconds.

Beasty metro rush CLICK