Metro: Last Light & For The King Free On Epic

There is a band called The Airborne Toxic Event and they have a song called “Numb” about isolation; Yep. Monday, I wanted to jump in an oven thanks to Prime Gaming as I covered everything in February, while later Mike spoke about Life Is Strange turning six. Tuesday, Taylor covered Battleborn‘s death finally coming, as I covered the demise of Google Stadia’s game development efforts. Wednesday, I was back to talk all things EA: First Apex Legend‘s Switch release finally being announced, and later, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition‘s release announced for later this year (I’ll take that as a birthday present). Thursday, Taylor spoke about a game starring a bloke named James, and later Alexx covered the Kickstarter launch for a game with a stupidly long name.

It is Friday, so you know what that means: I am annoyed for one reason or another. As the song reference above might suggest (great band name, by the way!), being told to isolate for X number of days is quite a numb feeling. Other than being negative and yet still told to isolate (thanks, contact tracing), the mood could also be contributed to the Epic Games Store. Last week I noted I’d be forced to rehash my bored and nonexistent care for IronOak and Curve Digital’s game, For The King. It is a game I covered last April, speaking about AI being confined in terms of sliders dictating their chaos, artificially slow turn-based mechanics, and dialogue and fluff-text that makes a dyslexic curl up in a ball and chew his own face off.

However, with moods being dampened by that throughout the week I was slightly surprised to see that it was not the only game available. No, to make my coming days a little happier Epic decided to make it a surprise double-bill. This is something I’d normally be annoyed at, but I’m not playing either game before writing this article this week. The Metro series is a bit of a weird one that’s partly apocalypse, part horror, part shooter, and strangely enough, partly that one episode of Doctor Who, “The Doctor’s Daughter.” The first game was previously available for free back in 2019; Now, the second (and last) game’s one console generation later remaster, Metro: Last Light Redux, is available.

Continuing the adventures of the proto-humanoid semi-mute, we crawl through tunnels in Russia shooting the horrors of nuclear war and everything else. Yes, confirmed here, Artyom is a Hath fighting off humans and Dregs from that crap episode of Chibnall’s Who, “Orphan 55.” Ok, being serious for a moment, at least the Metro series is better written than Chibnall’s spaff shot against a wall. With great human characters mumbled out in faintly suspect Russian accents, it is only exemplified further by the world-building of exchanging bullets for currency. At least it isn’t a very dull open-world crafting shoot ’em up, I say as I take a strained look at Metro: Exodus.

Both Metro: Last Light Redux and For The King are available until next Thursday, the 11th of February. If you have neither, I’d suggest picking up both and suggesting your friends get For The King because that needs multiplayer for anything decent. Next week, I’ll be ranting about something that looks very FTL with its space themes, though seems to be the classic turn-based RPG when it comes to gameplay. I guess we’ll find out when I find out more about Halcyon 6 Starbase Commander.