Subway: a semi-nutritious alternative to fast food, or post-nuke Russian refuge? Metro 2033 lobbies for the latter, letting us play in an apocalypse where affordable footlong sandwiches are forgotten luxuries of a dead, Jared-less era. Twenty-two years after a worldwide nuclear catastrophe, Russian survivors have retreated to Moscow’s tubes, forming a network of underground city-states. Breeds of psychically inclined supermutants roam the wastes above, and lucky you: you’re one of the brave few able to venture back to the surface for supplies.

Today, you’re scouring a library for one of Earth’s now-rarest resources: books. You and two companions go room to room, huffing through heavy gas masks as you wander a ruined lobby. A giant bat, bigger than any you’ve seen in a JRPG, shatters a skylight and dives down to grab your comrade with its claws. Your homemade shotgun spits a few shells, the belt clip rotating in new ones as you try to shoot it down. No go.

Metro’s unique horrors comprise an eye-catching menagerie. Creatures called “librarians” play on your instincts to pound the trigger: they’re vicious if you engage them, but won’t attack as long as you keep looking directly at them. In a subway tunnel, we spotted a floating orb of radiation — a glowing ghost that resembled a tiny white sun before teleporting away. We’d take regular run-ins with sedan-sized bats over waves of cookie-cutter bad guys any day, and it’s these types of encounters that make us hopeful for what the developer’s shooting for: a Half-Life-esque, atmospheric, story-driven experience, similar but different from the apocalyptic PC game many members of the dev team helped create in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

The story draws on a Russian cult novel of the same name, interspersing flashbacks of an encounter that your character, Artem, had with a psychic mutant. These reveal your latent telepathy, but it’s conveyed with subtlety. It won’t come in the form of explicit powers — nothing so BioShock as a left hand jutting a wave of force from your palm — but as more passive, perception-based feats, we’re told. This should feed into 4A’s plans for a few stealth missions, and A.I. that can use sound and smell to detect you.

It’s these bits of intuitive, less-conventional design that catch our eye. Instead of stapling a mini-map to the corner of the screen, Metro takes a cue from Far Cry 2 — you hold up a journal in real time (and flick a lighter to read in the dark) to plot routes and mark objectives. Artificial HUD elements are kept to a minimum: when you’re surface-side, a wristwatch reminds you when to swap your oxygen canister (or if your mask starts to frost up), and a small LED flashes yellow, then red if you’re creating too much noise. Syringe injections replace auto-regenerating health and medkits, too.

An impressive graphics engine pushes it all, led by lighting that renders the helmet flashlights, barrel fires, and dim auxiliary lamps that flicker in the subway. Physics and destructibility are another part: in one mission, we sniped a crown of icicles to crush a group of guards below; in the library, we splintered a worn door with some buckshot for a quick shortcut.

We won’t call it a Russian Fallout 3, but Metro 2033 backs up a familiar post-apoc premise with intriguing, abnormal enemies, well-animated weapons, and a mostly enclosed setting — not unlike BioShock. And is that such a bad thing?