I'm really looking forward to the upcoming shooter, Metro 2033, set for release in mid-March.   Excited and kind of leery at the same time, actually.   You see, it's a first-person shooter with RPG elements.   This scares me--no, frightens me.   Terrifies, even.   Why?   Well to be perfectly honest, games that try to mix the two never turn out quite right.   We first saw this with Fallout 3.

The problem is that an RPG is all about levels and statistics.   You either meet the requirements to perform x action, or you don't.   In a first-person shooter (herein referred to simply as "FPS") you already meet the requirements if you have a gun in your hand.   That's how it works:   you have a weapon, you point it at the target, and you shoot; enemies are equally hard to everyone and how well you do against them depends on how skilled you actually are, not how skilled the game says you are by assigning some number to a certain skill field.

This combination becomes maddening to anyone more familiar with FPSs than RPGs.   You see, you can't simply point a gun at an enemy and pull the trigger to kill an enemy in this sort of game.   No, you might have an enemy's face in your sights with your crosshairs aimed right between his/her/its eyes, but that high-powered sniper rifle (assuming you're at a high enough level to even use that weapon yet) does not guarantee a headshot kill.   In fact, if your accuracy is not at a sufficient level, you might not even hit the target at all; it doesn't matter if the gun has very little recoil and the scope puts the Hubble telescope to shame.   If you do make contact, you might end up emptying clip after clip into this enemy and your only hope of walking away from the encounter alive being your ability to run as fast as you possibly can to the next town/map in hopes that the game doesn't load your persuer into the new map as well--or hoping that the new map is friendly and the persuer fires the first shot, causing everyone around to unload into them as well until you're on the floor of your bedroom and crying with relief.

I recently got the opportunity to play Borderlands co-op.   It's actually a decent game if you're into RPGs.   My friend, whose game it was, was up ahead clearing out enemies and whatnot while I pretty much just dicked around behind him (note to self:   re-word that) and got to know the game a bit more while taking in the cel-shaded sights.   I was fully aware that it was an RPG, but it never became apparent until he was working his way up some platforms to kill some boss while I hung back (woefully under-leveled for such a task) and popped out from behind a rock wall every so often to draw the fire of the rocket-launching turret at the top.   At one point I died, but it's OK, there was a respawn marker only a couple meters behind me; right after some bandit/raider camp with a fellow who can throw axes through rocks.

I know the nature of RPGs and was very aware that enemies respawn frequently.   Because of this, I made sure to swivel around and check the area.   Just as I had suspected, an enemy respawned in the camp, but just as soon as I had seen him, he saw me and the fight was on.   The problem is that I was a level <10, and he was not.   Clip after clip was wasted, but he still killed me.   What's worse, he ended up staying at the respawn marker, dooming me to infinite deaths.   Yes, I got camped by an NPC; the same thing happened during my first trial with World of Warcraft, and I'm well aware that RPGs and I do not go well together.   My friend was forced to traverse back down and save me from my never-ending death penalty.   So embarrassing and so unnecessary if it had been a true FPS and all that RPG garbage was removed.

So really, all I'm getting to here is that games should never have an underlying RPG engine but package the game as if the gameplay is FPS-ish.   There's a reason I have yet to pick up Fallout 3 again:   it lied to me and grinding is just too fucking boring to waste time on a game that's just going to keep lying (actually, I will be finishing the game sometime soon, but you get the idea).   I have no problem with Borderlands as long as I don't have to spend the money to buy it for myself.   And really, I just hope Metro 2033 isn't too RPG-ish.   I can deal with having to buy weapons (with ammunition as money, which is really just genius) and if the surface of Moscow is expansive and there's a little grind to it, that's just fine and awesome to me.   But the game better use a control scheme like Modern Warfare and if I have to level up to use a single damn weapon or item, or take on a single enemy, I'm on the next flight to 4A's Kiev headquarters and bringing a fury that makes Chernobyl circa 1986 look like a small house fire.

Oh, and to the Borderlands fans, if you didn't instantly make the connection between a planet called Pandora with a fabled vault that holds items which are fundamentally thought of as being sinful and leading to temptation and the myths of Pandora's Box that released all that's evil into the world, you obviously ride the short bus through life.