I love Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro books. They're dark, atmospheric and perfect apocalypse-horror in any way. And the fact that the 4A Games' Metro 2033 game, which is based on these books, is such a masterpiece makes just happy. It brings me pure happiness.
I remember starting to play the sequel Metro: Last Light on PC, but for one reason or another I never finished. So, when I saw that the redux version of Last Light were available for the Switch AND it was on a sale, I had to get it. And it's stunning. The graphics are something unbelievable for the Switch. And as the books, it's dark. But not in a good way, not in a story-wise way. The game itself is dark. Too dark. There's something weird going on with lightning that makes parts of the Last Light unplayable, because you just can't see anything. Setting brightness on my TV helped a little bit, but when playing in the handheld mode, it's still too dark as Switch really doesn't offer any kind of graphic settings. And the game itself doesn't have any real video related setting, like contrast, which is kind of weird.
I decided to find out what's going on.
It seems that I'm not only one with this problem, Last Light is too dark to play, especially in handheld mode. According to this Reddit post many others have experienced this too, and though some claim that adjusting Switch's brightness settings help, that's not case for the most. Old-school fix seems to be to throw a blanket over yourself and Switch. Some people seem to enjoy the difficulty and survival aspect this darkness brings (or then they haven't even played the game on Switch) but this seems to be minority. One Reddit user even went to say that ''use your lighter and flashlight - you’re in the Moscow Underground, dude!" which even being true doesn't really help as this game is pretty hard - you can't shoot and use your lighter at the same time, and sneaking in the darkness is hard as you hit the walls all of the time.
Though some people have said that the game runs well and is fun, there's still some reports of lag and even crashes - I have never in my life had any Switch game crash while playing, so that's interesting. Darkstation in their review don't recommend you to play in handheld mode as the issues with loading times and especially with lighting are pretty noticeable.
For me one fix was while playing on TV just adjust TV's own settings, like adding brightness and adjusting contrast, though this also is just a temporary fix - game is almost playable, but there are still some moments, especially if you play in the daylight, where game is too dark. And this doesn't help situation with the handheld mode at all, as expected. It's so weird that this game has no gamma setting or anything like that. Maybe I'm just so used to the options that are norm on PC...
It's disappointing. I don't know what the developers were thinking - it's like they didn't even try the game on Switch. I really expected much because surprisingly Last Light runs well and looks absolutely stunning on Switch, but the darkness makes it just unplayable. I guess I'll need to finish it on PC.
*Sigh.*
By the way, there is Metro Redux on Switch tech review video made by Digital Foundry on Youtube which you should check out if you're interested in game tech. I need to take a loot at it myself when I got time and maybe then I'll return to this topic. Maybe. This is not a promise. I just wanted to get this irritating problem out of my chest.
