Try to imagine living in a world where you’ve never gazed into a sunny blue sky, never felt a cool fresh breeze through your hair or even tasted clean, fresh water. Where all you’ve ever known is a harsh Morlock existence as humans eke out a meagre survival in the dark underground tunnels of a ruined Metro system – the last bastion of human civilisation; where the surface is a ruined wasteland and the very air and unfiltered sunlight of a nuclear winter kills those foraging for supplies unprotected; where you constantly battle hideous mutants and the next twisted stage of human evolution – psychic mutants known as the ‘Dark Ones’, who intend to see us go into extinction one bloody death at a time…

This harsh future is the backdrop for Metro 2033, the forthcoming FPS from Ukrainian developer 4A Games based on the novel of the same name by novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky. Perhaps it’s an interesting symptom of their chequered history, but it’s hard to find people that can spin a darker yarn than the Russians. Their literature of recent years, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, has proven a good source of dystopian science-fiction material for games. After all, they are a nation that underwent the turmoil of their own failed 20th Century utopian experiment – and still bear the scars.

When we asked Metro 2033’s creative director Andrew Prokhorov if he felt the game’s resulting dark tone might be a product of the post-Soviet condition during a recent trip to see it, he laughed, “That’s a question for the psychologists! How the Soviet Union, and the devastation of the Soviet Union have influenced it, I really don’t know. I started creating a scenario for a game set in a post-nuclear world, showed it to my friend, and he asked if I’d read [Metro 2033] on the internet. I read it and the same evening said to him, 'Let’s make a game.'” But Prokhorov admits Metro 2033’s world, with its tagline ‘Fear The Future’ certainly isn’t a happy one. “I have two children, and maybe my next game will be something bright and happy!”

In many ways Metro 2033 reminds us of dystopian Russian shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl, and Prokhorov freely admits its influence. “The Ukrainian games industry is not that developed. It’s very incestuous,” he says. “In the amount of time that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was being developed, if you were a game developer in the Ukraine there’s a good chance you worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It’s one degree of separation and certainly not any more than that.”

But unlike GSC Game World’s open-world FPS/RPG hybrid, 4A Games is crafting a much tighter-focused linear FPS experience akin to Half-Life 2 and BioShock. In fact the developer cites them directly as influences, which is brave given the calibre of those titles, but it certainly rings true in Metro 2033’s atmosphere. PC gamers are in for a treat if 4A Games can pull off everything it’s trying to do.

In Metro 2033 nuclear disaster has totally destroyed the world, but fortunately that proudest of Soviet achievements – the Moscow Metro – proved to be an amazing bomb shelter, and it’s here that the remnants of human civilisation survive. The Metro has evolved into a system of station cities. Twenty years after the disaster, survivors still need to forage the poisoned ruins for supplies and ammunition that can’t be created in the Metro.

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