I've been diving back into Ghost Recon Wildlands after discovering just how damn enjoyable the game is at the highest difficulty levels. Suddenly sniper rifles and stealth are the only viable playstyles, and I feel like I'm actually being tested by the AI rather than watching all these paper narcos obligingly fall over and die for my amusement. I also love how unwoke the game is. Very America Fuck Yeah.
I also dusted off Master of Magic. Still haven't found a 4X that rivals it in my eyes, and it's not nostalgia talking. I actually never played it growing up (though I played MoO and MoO2 like my childhood depended on it). Good shit.
Yeah I find Exodus to be the Fallout 4 of the Metro series. Decent enough game but is ruined by how much better everything which came before it is.
I find your opinion heretical and demand you expound upon it. Please.
The first two metro games cultivate an incredible atmosphere of claustrophobic dread, twinged with a sliver of hope that despite our best efforts, we as humans might just survive the end of the world. It keeps the world nice and mysterious while adding some very interesting supernatural elements that nicely contrast the central decision Artyom has to make between being a soldier whose only interest is following orders, and a person who is ready to embrace the change to the new world and what it might bring.
Exodus rains all over that by showing that the happenings in Moscow are silly in comparison because the rest of the world seeks to have survived just fine. The retcon-y reason doesn't really work very well if you ask me. It also takes games about the unique and interesting environment of the metro and replaces them with yet another generic, homogenised, open-world survival-crafting game with loot to find. There's no more claustrophobic dread because you know you can just run away across open terrain and there's no real threat that can keep up.
Contrast the Dead City chapters of Exodus with the rest of the game. Only there is there real tension and subtle horror and it just shows how relatively lacking the rest of the game is.