A Tale of Two Colonels or Fire! Fire! Fire!

[Peter_Brosdahl]

A few weeks back the first content DLC was released for Metro Exodus called "The two Colonels". If you felt you were missing some of the dungeon crawling moments that fans of the franchise got used to in the previous entries then this might be for you. Much like previous DLC for Last Light this little bit serves to expand on one of the story arcs you briefly come across in the main campaign.

I will try to avoid giving spoilers for the campaign, or DLC, but here is a couple of items of note. The two colonels begins with your character delving into the Metro to clean out slime and other unwanted additions their water system. You are mainly only given a flame thrower for the majority of this campaign.

I found myself often wanting to quote a certain delinquent from MTV by repeatedly saying “Fire, Fire, Fire”. I think you know the one. If you like burning things then this DLC will provide your inner pyro with plenty to ignite. An interesting twist is that this DLC also tries to serve as a vehicle to provide a significant amount of narrative to the Metro Exodus story. It is basically broken into 4 or 5 parts that intermixes actual game play along with primarily walking around witnessing numerous events to develop the story. I found myself with ambivalence with this as I wanted to do more and watch less but to each their own.

A full performance review is beyond the intended scope of this story but here is a few specs to note. I have two rigs that are mainly used for gaming. One is a 2600k@4.3Ghz with a overclocked Strix 1080TI paired to a 1440p/144hz G-Sync Monitor. The other is a 4930K@4.3Ghz with a overclocked Strix 2080TI paired to a 4k HDR T.V. The game is played at max settings on both rigs. The 1080TI rig mostly held 80-120 fps at 1440p. There were occasional spikes to over 144fps. With the 2080TI I used RT at Ultra and DLSS. It is obvious that the developers were using this DLC as a means to experiment with particles, lighting, and various ray tracing effects. The 2080TI rig mainly held 45-55 fps during most of the game play and some sections at a solid 60 fps. Considering how much was usually happening onscreen this was acceptable to me.

Over all I found it to be a fun but short DLC. Someone could easily burn, pun intended, through this in under an hour. I am a bit of an eye candy addict so I took my time in looking at everything and stretched it to about 3-4 hours. I did noticed more than a few either unfinished textures or other oddities but it was mostly a nice revisit to those days of crawling thru the Metro waiting for something to attack from any corner, puddle, or hole in the wall. Tell us about your experiences with it if you delved into this particularly slimy sewer entry.

Edit: For those wondering. The above screen shots were taken on the 1440p rig.