The Platinum Road #5 - Dad and the Dark One: (Metro: Last Light Redux)

After Metro 2033 of course comes the sequel, Metro: Last Light. There’s less finnicky trophies this time around and there’s more content that I’ve not expeirenced before so this should be a fun Platinum journey.

Stage 1: Aryom the Stalker

Given how easy Ranger was in the first game, I’ve chosen to do only one playthrough for the Diary pages and Moral points rather than the playthrough and speedrun I did with the first game.

We start off rip with a trophy similar to gunslinger (which I somehow managed to edit out of the original article??) from the first game but not nearly as bad. ‘Not a Rabbit’ has you completing the first proper level - Ashes, without taking a hit. It's a weird description since there's only one real combat encounter you have to survive, that being against some Nosalis. There's not really a puzzle to solve or a plan of action like there is with Gunslinger, but this still took 3 or 4 tries due to some unlucky shots from Anna and the Nosalis just having weird janky hotboxes at times.

I had already gotten through 99% of Separation before I remembered that there was a trophy for alert and no enemy contact so I made the mistake of resetting the checkpoint only to fail the trophy about 5 or 6 times. I eventually just said to hell with it and gunned my way through. Between that and failing the same style trophy in Facility (despite thinking I had done it properly), the challenges were gonna be left until later. I did get the similar trophy on Bandits without too much hassle so that was a pleasant change.

One that I wasn’t looking forward to was Scram, which is for not taking damage while on the railcar in Regina. I was playing on Ranger rather than Spartan but I think the Watchman have less health in this section. I did have to reset once until I worked out I can move and aim at the same time and realizing the enemies came in set waves meant this was an easy one to work out.

Venice was an eventful level, drinking more than my fill for Cheers! and watching all 10 minutes of the stage show for Patron of the Arts. I did originally think I had done this wrong as I didn’t sit down in the avaliable seat so turns out you get it no matter what as long as you’re in the room so that’s nice.

I thought I wasn’t going to get the ending, cutscene changes at the last second, very anxiety inducing especially since I seemingly missed the dialogue from the Dark One which lets you know which ending you’re going to get. I was certain I had hit a lot of the moral points but I also knew there was some I missed. It all worked out in the end though - D6 was saved.

Stage 1.5: This close to nuking Russia myself (3:40)

Once again we have the normal catchup we have to do - thankfully Last Light dosnt have any of the get ‘N Kills with Weapon’ trophies like 2033 does but it still has the Safe and Tripwire trophies. For the former, I chose to reset Echoes, just dealing with Pavel’s rambling. This took 5 resets. As for the latter, the abandoned mall in Nightfall provided several tripwires to disarm for this trophy, that one took 4 wires.

Somehow, I missed just one diary page despite following the guide so a quick run through the level Quarantine (The one with the sex scene as Jade pointed out), I had got another Diary trophy.

Alexa, play Duran Duran

There are 3 trophies for stealth in the game but this time around players can’t kill or knockout the enemies here, it’s a total ghost run. There’s one for Seperation, Facility and Revolution (which are nearly back to back levels which is amusing). Seperation took a few attempts, totaling 20 minutes, Facility was a lot better taking only 10 minutes which might have been a perfect run.

Revolution? 2 and a half bloody hours.

I’d love to tell you what went wrong but there’s so much. The enemy behavior varied wildly between runs, with them reacting to the same movements completely different per run. There’s also the lovely little glitch that for this specific level, checkpoint resets don’t work so any failure requires quitting to the main menu and starting again. All the guides used Spartan difficulty rather than Survivor so the strategies didn’t translate to an easily replicable strategy.

It got so bad I quit doing this in favor of doing Derailed, which is for beating this level after killing every enemy. That was very satisfying and only took like 10 minutes. Returning to the run, I got it first or second try. I still don’t know how, I feel like I made the exact same lines and was seen but I was just happy that it was even possible.

Stage 2: Tales from Metro (4:25)

So, these were DLC for the original game but have been incorporated into the game for Redux and consequently have been made part of the Platinum process. This is all new content to me so I was interested to try them out, all of them blind too.

Heavy Squad - 0:15

First up was playing as a Nazi in the Frontline against the Red Army. Nazis are bad obviously but they got cool tools like a minigun and a grenade launcher to use. There’s not much else going on in this chapter.

Kshatriya - 0:35 (0:20 + 0:15)

I wasn’t expecting this - essentially a rogue like mode built within Metro but more of a Roguelike than lite as death means a full restart. You’re tasked with gathering a bunch of items as part of a scavenger group, returning them for bullets to spend on better equipment like radioactive proof suits to venture further. Thankfully, you can win by just finding the final item. After one attempt, I just watched a video and followed the awfully convoluted route to get the item. I would have done it legitimately if I had to, but I didn’t. So I didn’t.

Sniper Team - 0:50 (0:15, 0:10, 0:10, 0:10, 0:05)

I really wanted to like this level since it felt like an old school Call of Duty mission but man Metro is a glitchy game. The first four attempts were scuppered by the fact the game checkpointed every time the alarm was sounded, meaning I was in an infinite loop of failing. Bit like Revolution, this meant full resets of the level. After learning what to do from gradually further attempts, a brief 5 minute jaunt led to victory.

Spider Lair - 0:25

My second favourite of the DLC but it had the chance to be the best. Set in a spider infested wing of D6, you’re a scavenger that has to fight their way out by gradually ascending and finding weapons to fend off the ludicrous amount of Spiders. If you turned this into a little bit of a Metroidvania or add a Stalker like enemy (Just turn this into a Resident Evil game), I’d play a four hour version of this.

Pavel - 0:30

This one was kind of weird, in that it felt like a level in the game but without any of the context, kind of like a fan developed level. I’m also not sure where it fits in the context of the story. A perfectly okay level.

Khan - 0:20

This one was probably my favourite of the levels as it stars Uhlman escorting Khan to Polis after Artyom derails the train saving the baby dark one. Their journey takes the to an abandoned station where Khan’s usual Metro magic takes hold. There’s more of a horrror vibe here, with some jumspscare esque moments. Honestly I’d have taken a whole campaign of this.

Anna - 0:35

Taking place during the main campaign mission Ashes, this mission obviously follows Anna’s perspective which is covering Artyom against the Nosalises before fighting Nazis. I don;t know if it was just a more intense arrangement of enemies in this section but I really struggled to get through. In the end, it seemed like dumb luck.

Tower - 0:05

This the classic wave based survival mode, presented through VR missions (which admittedly is a little weird in the Metro universe but whatever). For some reason there’s a glitch that allows you to complete the levels by spamming the ‘Put on/Take off mask’ command so naturally I just did that. I’ve played the game and played other wave modes, I get the idea I didn’t need to play it.

Developer Level - 1:00

This is just a museum for seeing the game’s models and stuff which is pretty cool but it has a trophy for being in it for an hour. I’ve used that hour to take the bins/recycling out and started writing up this article, seemed like a productive use of time.

And with the trophy for Developer popping (Not 5 minutes after writing the prior paragraph), that is the Platinum trophy for Metro: Last Light obtained! Took 18:50, not including the original 11 hour odd playthrough. Not having weapon trophies is nice but some of these trophies really soured my experience by not working properly. All in all, not too bad, defintely done worse. Now, 2 of the 4 Metro titles have been completed, with the other two waiting for years end. Not sure what comes next for The Platinum Road, but stay tuned!