32 hours into my first playthrough of Metro Exodus. I think I'm on the last chapter now (dead city). The game is simply a great piece of art. It adds open world like mechanics but in such an immersive way that even if you are "clearing" a marker, it takes a lot of deliberate thought and planning that it genuinely feels like a linear level inside a cohesive open world. There have been attempts like this, in games like Gears 5, TLoUP2, Uncharted 4, where you suddenly are in this huge space and going back and forth to clear out stuff in a shallow way. This feels much more deep (TLoUP2 was better one of the three, but Exodus is much more detailed) and for me it really worked well.

The game is bit clunky, but I feel it only works in its favour. If you think of a cool FPS like Far Cry, everything is smooth, quick and snappy. Guns feel great, killing is fun, traversal is pretty much brainless. Metro Exodus is completely opposite as your guns keep getting dirty, out of ammo or discharged. Killing isn't fun as you've to be careful with ammo and also the moral points. Traversal is slow or so finicky that you have to pay attention. All that clunk makes you actually feel everything the game wants you to feel.

The criticisms that I do have though are largely to do with dumb AI and the good ending/bad ending system that is a series standard. I know I should not kill, so I try to be sneaky. But when I fail, then I can predict enemy movements, come in and out of dark places and just knock them out. This breaks everything and what should be either fun shoot out or a stressful stealth mission, becomes a cat and mouse game of knocking everyone out. You also don't want to skip any of the locations as the game otherwise teaches you that important loot or lore can be hidden, which is generally true. So if you want the good ending, and want to upgrade gear, you pretty much have to do the dance of knocking everyone out. This is why I'm 30 hours in to the game. If the game wants us to find all the lore, and wants us to improve our gear and use newer weapons, I think it shouldn't let us have agency over story, or it should have non lethal weapons to make it more fun to take out bases without killing anyone.

Overall I'm very happy with the game. I'll probably replay it and not care about good ending and just play it as a shooter even if the game doesn't want you to do that (OMG the terrible music it plays when you do something wrong lol).