The one area where the game may be a little lacking, however, is the combat. That experience has arrived on the Switch fully intact. This is a game where you have to scrounge for and preserve your bullets, and where you often have to make the choice to run rather than stay and fight. When monsters charge at you through flickering lights, the experience is the same here as you’d get on any other console.Īnd since Metro 2033 is based so much around its atmosphere - gloomy, desperate, tense - it works here mostly pretty well.
The dark graphics are a feature, not a bug, which means that the game didn’t have to sacrifice too much to come over to the Switch. I didn’t play much of the Metro franchise on other consoles, but I played enough to know it’s meant to be all claustrophobic and eerie, a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has mostly been forced underground into dank tunnels and where unknown dangers lie in wait to tear you apart. That’s not meant to be a criticism, by the way. If no one can see what’s happening, after all, no one can see the rough edges and papered-over seams. Metro 2033 seems to have discovered the solution to this challenge: make everything as dark and dank as possible. I mean, I loved The Witcher 3, and Skyrim, and Bioshock, and all kinds of other classics that have come over to Nintendo’s hybrid console, but I think it’s clear that they don’t necessarily look as good as they do on other systems.
One of the criticisms that big-budget games get when they’re ported to the Switch is that, more often than not, sacrifices need to be made in order to get the games working properly.