Metro 2039 Looks Stunning In First Gameplay, Launching Later This Year

Today, as part of an Xbox-branded reveal, developer 4A Games showed off Metro 2039, the next entry in its popular post-apocalyptic survival shooter franchise. The upcoming FPS looks incredible in the first tease of gameplay, showing 4A continuing to push its in-house engine and make something that looks damn-near photorealistic.

Here’s the new gameplay clip of Metro 2039. Heads up, it’s short, but it illustrates that, after the open world of Metro Exodus, 4A is returning the franchise to the metro tunnels of post-apocalyptic Moscow, Russia.

This time around, players will take on the role of “The Stranger,” a character who is having nightmares and is forced back into the metro tunnels after swearing to never return. All the factions seen in the past games have been united under a fascist dictator who now rules the tunnels below Russia and the people who call these terrible pockets of humanity home. According to Metro 2039′s co-creative director and lead audio designer, Pawel Ulmer, this will be the darkest story yet in the franchise.

“We are not romanticizing the post-apocalypse, or making a theme park out of it,” said Ulmer. “Metro has always been a more tragic view on our actions as humanity.”

Developing Metro 2039 while surviving a real war

Another thing that was mentioned a few times during the video event was the fact that Metro 2039 is being developed during wartime. 4A Games is a Ukrainian studio, and Russia’s ongoing invasion and war against the country have affected Metro 2039’s development. The devs explained that the story for the game changed after the invasion happened, adding that preventing war has long been a theme in the Metro series, but now they are living it daily. Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author whose books inspired the games, is back for 2039 and helping craft the shooter’s storyline while living in exile outside his native Russia after criticizing the government and the war.

“War is our reality, and our message has shifted to be about the consequences, the cost of silence, the horrors of tyranny, and the price of freedom,” said creative director Andriy Shevchenko. “Reality forced us to take a different approach, told from a uniquely Ukrainian perspective, but this is still a Metro story, in the Metro universe.”

“When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, it changed the lives of everyone in the studio—but more so of our team and families in Ukraine,” added Ulmer. “Even today, the majority of our team works from various locations around Ukraine.”

Metro 2039 is set to launch this winter on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC via Steam and the Epic Store.