YMMV / Metro Exodus

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Like in Metro 2035, is the war between Russia and NATO still ongoing after the nuclear war, xenophobic paranoia without thinking about the sorry state of the surviving countries, a propaganda piece by the Invisible Watchers—who may have also been Believing Their Own Lies—in order to keep the Metro population in line?
  • The conflict between Ed and Tom in Sam's Story. Is Tom really a Corrupt Corporate Executive who will use the submarine's nuclear weapons for ill intent like Ed claims? Or is Tom actually just a ruthless but honorable businessman and Ed is letting his paranoia get out of hand?
• Awesome Music: The combat music for Yamantau is deep, ominous, and perfect for your rampage through the base.
• Badass Decay: What happened to the Spartans following the Battle for D6. While victorious, the Order lost a lot of it's veteran members and allies, who were either killed in battle (Ulman), medically discharged (Miller), MIA (Hunter, Khan) or simply left (Anna, Arytom), as well as their base of operations. They survived, but are now dependent of Hanza for supplies as well as desperate for men. The remaining ones are, however, still the deadliest people in the Metro.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The Yamantau level has been very well-received, likely due its unique type of horror and the fact that it's one of the very few times that Metro players have ever been given an opportunity to be as murderous as possible without feeling bad about it.
  • Novosibirsk, due to its atmosphere, and much of it taking place in a metro. With supernatural elements also playing a heavy part as well.
• Catharsis Factor: One of the reasons Yamantau is praised. After a lot of sneaking around in prior levels, you get to cut loose with plentiful ammunition for your guns — on a horde of cannibals who tried to eat you earlier, no less.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Doctor is the leader of the people living in the Ark of Yamantau, where he convinced them not to leave the bunker to search for survivors and offer shelter for food, in favor of becoming cannibals. He would lure unsuspecting men, women, and children to the Ark for them to kill and eat, already claiming countless victims as seen by the many corpses, disembodied limbs, and flayed skin throughout the bunker. The Doctor also plans to torture Anna to death to force Artyom Chyornyj to lure the rest of the Aurora crew to the Ark for his cannibals to devour.
  • The Baron is the leader of Munai-bailer where he has enslaved the people regional to the barren Caspian Sea and rules over them through cruelty and manipulation. The Baron would subject these people to horrid working and living conditions, resulting in countless deaths, while creating a fake religion to brainwash them into accepting their roles as slaves, with some even becoming Cannon Fodder for the Baron to use against his enemies. The Baron would then order his soldiers to kill everyone onboard the Aurora train, threatening them with death if they fail, before luring Artyom, Giulnara Khakimova, and Damir into his hideout for him to kill.
  • Sam's Story DLC: Klim is the unhinged enforcer of Tom's gang, abusing his position to exert his brutality throughout Vladivostok; examples of this include hanging a group of bandits he killed in public, and slaughtering an innocent crew with only the Captain surviving, while Klim has mutants captured to use them against his enemies. Klim would then betray Tom, unleashing his army of bandits and mutants onto Tom and his allies, before commandeering Tom's submarine where Klim attempts to launch the nuclear missile inside to kill countless people.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Shrimps. They have a nasty tendency to climb aboard your canoe when Artyom has to travel across large bodies of water to swat at him, while he's momentarily helpless as he switches to his guns. Those that don't climb aboard tend to stay at a distance to pepper him with their acidic bile, which is annoyingly hard to dodge due to the small size of the canoe, and on Ranger Hardcore they deal a disturbing amount of damage with each hit, not helped by how they usually come in pairs (or more) and play whack-a-mole with you until you die. Worse yet, if there's a Tsar Fish around, the sound of gunfire will attract it to Artyom's location for a One-Hit Kill. And as the cherry on top, they start appearing around the Volga chapter, which is very early on when Artyom hasn't acquired the right gear the fight them with yet.
  • For more literal demonic spiders, look no further than the Spiderbugs. With the exception of recent hatchlings, they are virtually immune to gunfire and their chief weakness is light, which kills them very slowly (unless you set them on fire). Their favourite hobby is to run full tilt at Artyom when he's trudging slowly through their webbed lairs, which is made worse when he has to cross areas that cause his flashlights to short out. Better hope you know where the wall torches are.
• Genius Bonus: You're on an expedition through the Siberian wilderness, helmed by a guy called Yermak.
• Narm:
  • There is absolutely nothing funny or charming about the cannibals in the Yamantau complex. The game does an exquisite job of setting up the complex as a foreboding, frightening place from the outside and the inside! My God, the inside! One vast cannibal larder full of feral humans who want to eat you, your father in law, your wife, your comrades. But the English dub makes some of the shrieks of "MEEEEAT!" unintentionally hilarious and one exchange is also unintentionally funny. "Why you shoot? Look what happen" "Uh ... meat got away" the infantile as opposed to crazed with hunger delivery of some of the lines makes the Yamantau level a little unintentionally funny.
  • Sam's dialogue in Sam's Story caused a fair amount of players to cringe due to his tendency to drop incredibly cheesy one-liners like it's going out of style, instead of being a Silent Protagonist like Artyom was. Driven up to eleven if you're playing with the Russian dub on, since those same lines will be spoken in English by his Russian actor, who very clearly does not actually speak English and is guessing at the pronunciation.
• Narm Charm: Tokarev quoting the "I hate sand" monologue from Attack of the Clones should come off an annoying cheap grab at an out of date meme but with the group having just left a desert, and him being the gunsmith who has to get all the sand out of their guns, the lines are sensible and even more appropriate than in Anakin Skywalker's teen angst grieving.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The Ranger Hardcore difficulty. Target reticule is disabled, there is no quick saving, supplies are extremely limited, enemies become aware of Artyom's presence much faster, most safehouses have their workbenches blocked, weapons require cleaning more frequently and the HUD is mostly grayed out, making it harder to see if you're near something that can be interacted with. Artyom can also be killed with a single bullet at full health, making stealth a necessity rather than an option.
  • The Self-Imposed Challenge modes introduced with the Ranger Update take this even further. For even more masochism, these stack with Ranger Hardcore. Have fun playing through the entire game as a Glass Cannon, using only one gun, being unable to craft supplies on the field, fighting uber-tough enemies, with no manual or checkpoint saving.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You can only carry one shared weapon mod of each type in your backpack (not including the ones you've equipped to a weapon)^note Let's say you pick up a silencer, and equip it to your AK. You can then pick up another silencer of the same type, and equip it to another weapon, then pick up a third one to keep in your backpack. . If you pick up another one when you already have one in your backpack, it gets scrapped into resources. Unfortunately, this means that if you detach a weapon mod from one of your guns while you already have one of that weapon mod in your backpack, the mod you removed gets scrapped into resources. This is never explained in-game, and most players will only discover it when they try to equip/de-equip shared weapon mods and wonder why some of their mods have disappeared.
  • The save system of Exodus is strongly hated by many players. For each save slot, Exodus keeps at most three files at any given time, with newer ones being created will result in the oldest saves being deleted. This makes Save Scumming impossible without manually backing up save files every time something important happens. Not helping matters is its tendency to make all three saves in the exact same location, making it impossible to rollback period. This gets extremely annoying when one is attempting a Ranger Hardcore or Golden Ending run, as autosaves are not known to be made at convenient points, often leaving restarting entire chapters the only solution when something goes wrong.
  • If you want the good ending, then you can't kill certain groups of people. This enforces a stealthy/non-lethal playstyle in some areas, where some players would prefer a stealthy/lethal or full Rambo approach. Not everyone was happy with this.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Bastard, which lives up to its name partly by virtue of being outclassed by all other options. While in previous installments it was fairly useful due to using the common 5.45 ammunition and being given for free (and being upgradeable to be a rather serviceable close-range weapon in all respects), in Exodus, it uses the much harder-to-find .44 Magnum, with a correspondingly lower ammunition cap, and is prone to overheating rapidly. It's intensely vulnerable to getting dirty and can be counted on to jam at least once in a magazine, all the while chewing through your pistol ammunition and giving you too little damage to show for it. The other pistol-ammunition weapon, the revolver, does not jam and can be found in the same level along with multiple upgrades that make it an effective sniper or marksman rifle, ensuring excellent ammo economy. Meanwhile, any work requiring an automatic weapon can be handled by the Kalash you are given from the very beginning. Beyond that, the shotgun is just a better close-range weapon by virtue of not jamming and having greater stopping power. Even if you're looking for a silenced weapon, the Tikhar is better by virtue of being quieter, easy to make ammo for, having a larger ammunition capacity, and also being handed to you for free like the Kalash, along with frequent upgrades that keep it relevant throughout the game that are also given to you for free.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The first two games had Normal and Hardcore difficulty. This game adds Easy and a Story Difficulty Setting.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Church of the Water Tsar are largely portrayed as Evil Luddites for their fanatical fear of electricity and advanced technology. However, there are numerous highly dangerous electrical anomalies located near their settlement, so their dogma of avoiding electricity is more borne out of self-preservation than anything else.
• Squick: Burning webs with your lighter might cause the spiders to crawl across your arm. Or your gas mask. Or your face, if you're not wearing the gas mask. They're larger than your hand. See also the leeches in Novosibirsk.
• That One Achievement:
  • Forest Child is Pacifist Run taken to the extreme. Basically, you must beat the entirety of the Taiga chapter without so much as looking at anyone funny, as merely attacking another human automatically voids the achievement. That means knocking them out non-lethally is out of the question. You also cannot be spotted at all. While stealthing through Taiga itself is actually doable, its basically a Luck-Based Mission since the terrain is very linear, and Artyom will almost always be within an arm's reach of someone hostile. The game's wonky save system doesn't help matters due to its tendency to save your progress at basically random, including after Artyom has been spotted and the achievement voided, and God have mercy on the poor idiot who decides to attempt it on Ranger difficulties. It becomes more manageable on lower difficulties like Reader, where quicksaves are available, but even then being entirely sneaky can be difficult sometimes, particularly during daytime.
    • To drive home just how annoying Forest Child can be, it has one of the lowest achievement rate on any platform, falling in the single-digit percentage range. That means more people have obtained the Golden Ending on Ranger Hardcore than this achievement, to put things into perspective.
  • Iron Mode is there for the particularly masochistic. It's Checkpoint Starvation cranked up to eleven, where you can only save at the end of each chapter. Should you die, screw up a Pacifist Run, or the game decides to be cute and crash to desktop, you'll need to restart the current chapter from scratch. Fortunately, it can be done on any difficulty, even the easiest one, but for your own sanity's sake, please do not attempt this on Ranger.
• That One Level:
  • Caspian is hated by some players due to one reason: it's too damn wide! Even with the car, getting anywhere takes a long time. Time that you could be spending on something else. Not to mention, the bumpy map geometry makes it incredibly easy for the car to become stuck and not retrievable. Even worse, there are active oil fountains everywhere, which, if you're not careful, will drown you or burn you to death. If the game autosaves in such a case, be prepared to either restart the entire chapter, or hike your way across the desert. The sandstorms are annoying as well, limiting your vision to basically punching distance and forces you to put on your gas mask. Fortunately, it is also the easiest chapter overall, both in terms of combat and for achieving a Pacifist Run.
  • Taiga is also frowned upon. It starts out as a No-Gear Level, requiring Artyom to make do with only a dingy crossbow for a long stretch of the chapter before he can get some actual guns to use, and resources like medkits are also scarce. Then you have to fight the Forest Master, a mutant bear that takes an absurd amount of lead to scare off, with said limited resources. The chapter is also lousy with mutant spawns, and its cramped linear structure makes it an absolute bitch to attempt a Pacifist Run on. Not only that, the last section of the game requires you to walk through a facility in complete darkness, with Spiderbugs lurking in every corner and only your lighter for any source of light. Did we mention there's an achievement for completing it without killing anyone or being seen at all?
  • Novosibirsk is one true hell hole, living up to its name. First of all, the entire upper ground is heavily irradiated and populated with Blind Ones, huge gorillas that are tougher than nails and very hard-hitting. Second, the underground sections has you being assaulted by moles that jump out of nowhere, and worms, which pops out of the water and spits acidic goop at you, then immediately haul ass, leaving you no window of action to retaliate. Also, the fleshy surfaces makes it very easy to get your gun dirty, and that said surface are filled to the brim with mutant leeches.

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