The book starts off pretty slowly with Artyom the 20 something year old protagonist and his mates cooking “coffee” (a bitter mixture of mushrooms boiled in a kettle) around a campfire. The first act of the book is just going over background information about the apocalypse. Basically they all ran underground to the metro stations 20 years ago and now they grow mushrooms. They sometimes send people to go outside to get bullets for everyone’s favorite primal instinct, This what Artyom hopes to do rather than being a guard. There are a ton of monsters because no apocalypse is complete without its unique monsters. Him and like 2 other people have to go gather information on the monsters now because their attacks on the humans have become more aggressive. Then Artyom is going to go but he meets some guy and he takes him to this station with criminals, also the stations are like tiny cities with a few hundred at most. Then that station gets attacked by nazis who exist in the subway system. Guess you could say that Metro 2033 went off the rails… Anyhow, he is captured and then rescued when a bunch of people apart of some other faction counter attack. So Artyom bets on a rat race, not rat cars but actual rats, entertainment is something else in the post apocalypse. After a few more complications unrelated to rodent betting, to keep the summary still considered brief, some people want him to get a book for a big favor so he goes to the surface but the library it’s in is full of radiation monsters so he turns it into a shooting gallery. The favor was the location of an ICBM. They get side tracked to rescue someone, fight a big monster, and then get there and decide to do that whole consuming moscow in atomic fire thing again to its “new inhabitants”. Yeah turns out the monsters were just trying to talk to him (except the ones in the library they were just really annoyed) and then Artyom has a mental breakdown… I think this is one of the best books i have ever read (that i can remember). That being said, it's the best of about 10 books I've read recently enough to count. I think this book does a lot better at self generating interest like i mentioned in my last review. I think I have expressed enough about this book more subtly through my summary with the tone and how long it is. Without raving on too long about this book, it's a 5/5 for its ability to play around with a pretty diverse amount of tones considering its setting, having pretty good action considering it's a book, and the usual characters and story stuff is ok. My advice to future readers is that if you want action dont read a book. On a more serious note I find this a little hard to recommend as much as I liked it on a personal level, books are opinionative like music and all forms of media. It was really popular in Russia and stuff but not elsewhere in the world so I can't really say…
Mariano R.
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