So Metro Exodus is pretty sweet. It is visually and graphically beautiful. It really is impressive. Like, man. It looks kinda like how I wish a new Fallout game would look, only more snowy... and very Russian.
Been a while since I played a survival shooter. All I can say is it's extremely unforgiving of poor resource management. You plan your trips very carefully. No haphazardly stumbling all over the map like in Fallout. You basically have to explore or you're sunk, and yet you also have to really, REALLY pick your battles and basically do everything you can to not have to gun down hoards of enemies, which are fucking EVERYWHERE. In everything you do you must be preparing yourself. Even getting caught by a couple baddies in the wrong spot can royally screw you later, if you aren't adequately prepared. I had to restart my first playthrough because I cornered myself so bad that getting back up and running probably would've taken longer. The meta mechanics are pretty generic... the crafting system in particular is basically a carbon copy of every other game with a crafting system these days. But it doesn't take away from the gameplay at all. That is very solid and decently fleshed-out.
I like the way movement and aiming is done in this game. It's kind of janky and unpredictable. Your movement is sluggish and limited. Firefights are awkward and stressful. You feel like a regular human in a truly dangerous world. There's an immediate tension to it. You've got to pay attention to all of these limitations that'll get you killed. Mind your environment and take it slow. Resources are precious, you are fragile, your weapons are fragile, dangers lurk everywhere, day or night.
I guess that's really any survival game, but the point is I think they did it right in this game. Thus far anyway. I'm immersed. But I'm barely out of the beginning... just getting to the point where you can cut loose and explore a little.
I will just say, RTX high is surprisingly playable on my Strix 2060 (I'm being specific because this card holds a 2ghz boost, which probably makes a difference...) 45-50 FPS at 1080/60 with high settings. And it's really not a choppy 45-50. It stays steadily in that range with very few dips or spikes, so everything still generally feels right, even if it's not quite as smooth. It looks great, too. Kind of subtle to actually be honing in on the differences, but it does impact the overall visual impression in a positive way. If they could work out the performance, I'd be totally on board with RTX. Looking at the implementation with Metro, I'm sold on it... honestly I think it's a nice improvement in most places. But for now I'll stick to running the game on extreme settings with RTX off and enjoying a smooth 60FPS (well there are momentary dips to 55 in a couple of specific loactions, but that's neither here nor there - without a counter going I don't see them and it seems to be an optimization problem, as lowering settings doesn't change it.) The problem with RTX right now is that while it does have benefits, they're not far enough up from what can already be faked to justify such a crazy performance hit. It's not a huge loss to turn it off, which it should be for the performance penalty and point of entry. Instead it's like this cool feature that doesn't ever make sense to turn on. It's too bad, really. It's legitimately pretty cool stuff.
