Metro: Last Light Faction Pack DLC Review

In the Metro: Last Light Faction Pack DLC, you’ll find three brand new missions to play through, each told from the unique perspective of a brand new character from one of the game’s different factions. I started with the Reich character and found myself in a shooting gallery of sorts. I was trapped in a small outpost where enemies were blindly charging at me from down the corridor where I simply had the mission of mowing them all down. Using a brand new Gatling gun, a grenade launcher and a high powered sniper rifle, I sat back and took on the Red Army as they threw wave after wave of armored soldiers, snipers and even a tank at me.

It wasn’t offensively bad, but for a game like Metro where so much has been done in order to pull you into a breathing world, this was a slap in the face as everything was broken down to one very simple objective. The skirmish lasted no more than 10-15 minutes, and I quickly found myself on the main menu again.

Next, I chose the Red Army mission, hoping that I’d have something a bit more rewarding waiting for me. This mission tasked me as a sniper trying to infiltrate a Reich camp in a makeshift stealth type game. I had to choose which enemies to engage, take them out without their buddies finding their corpses, and do everything in my power to keep the alarms from being sounded.

This was a bit better and certainly more true to what made Metro: Last Light a fun game, but still wasn’t offering much. I failed the mission a few times from guards seeing a dead sniper up in their nest in a way that didn’t quite seem realistic, and during the last five minutes I noticed that as long as I was able to quickly switch targets, it was easier for me to simply mow down the last few guards and stroll past. This part of the DLC ran for about a half hour.

Going into the third faction’s offering, I had all but given up hope on the DLC. Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised to find a true Metro-style game waiting for me. Playing as a brand new Polis Ranger, I had to run up to the surface to collect artifacts before returning to the metro to sell them off for bullets. The artifacts are mostly hidden in plain sight, but the environment was varied enough to push me to keep hunting.

Kshatriya also offers a brand new enemy named the Librarian who packs a pretty heft punch, so you’ll need to buy a new suit of armor if you even want a chance of standing toe-to-toe with it, which means you’ll be making plenty of back and forth trips to build up enough capital. There’s enough variation here with enemies and locations to keep it interesting, and may be enough to justify the DLC for a lot of players

While Metro: Last Light was about the idea of engaging you in a world that seems to exist without any relation to you, this DLC feels like it was built around you. This doesn’t sound all that bad until you realize that the unparalleled levels of immersion to be found were a massive selling point for the series in the first place. It really feels as if they had a few ideas for quests that didn’t make it into the main game and simply threw them out the door, while making up some completely alien context for their existence.

The Polis Ranger part of this DLC is pretty good, but one good mission out of three is a hard sell. There’s nothing in the Metro: Last Light Factions Pack that you’re going to be talking about when you’re done playing, and it offers just about as much depth as the average game demo. If you’re absolutely fanatical about the Metro universe, you may want to pick this one up, but for everyone else, it’s pretty safe to simply pass on this offering.

This review is based on a PC version of the game given to us for review purposes.