Metro Exodus, the long-awaited third game in the excellent Metro trilogy of shooters, is out now - but not necessarily in a way many PC gamers would have hoped. The game's exclusive to the Epic Games Store, and potential players are naturally cautious of this new digital client. We've been playing the game, so here's our Metro Exodus Epic Games Store performance review.
Bear in mind, this is an entirely personal experience, based on what I had when playing the game on PC - I don't know if they're down to Epic Games Store or not, but if someone has the Steam version and wants to compare they can do. I will talk about the store itself, though...
Metro Exodus Epic Games Store Performance Review - How does it run through Epic Games Store?
Let's start with the Epic Games Store itself, ignoring the fact that it took us multiple looks to even spot Metro Exodus in our Epic games library, due to the way it's laid out (even Origin is better). Download times for the game were on-par with Steam, pretty much, and the game installed to a sensible Program Files/Epic Games/Metro Exodus hang on a moment... why has the game installed to Program Files (with a new Epic Games folder) when the Epic Games store folder itself is actually in Program Files (x86)? That's just weird.
Anyway, Metro Exodus installed at 50Gb. I clicked the desktop icon, and nothing happened for around 15 seconds. I checked the Epic launcher, which confirmed it was running, and a few seconds later the game popped up. Hooray. The intro movie played, not allowing me to skip, and once it was done I was faced with a black screen for 20 seconds - then the game crashed. I tried it again, went through the same unskippable intro, waited through the same black screen for 30+ seconds, and finally got the main menu. Phew.
The game itself runs and looks pretty darn great, although every time I use the photo mode or Nvidia Ansel I got some weird flickering, or textures could look a little squashed. My PC's specs are a AMD FX-8300 Six-Core Processor, 16 Gb RAM, Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4Gb, and Windows 10 64-Bit, and I've got the latest Game Ready drivers for my Nvidia card, which are specifically for Metro Exodus. It does look good at least, and seems to basically run fine (at least to me) so actually playing the game I've got no complaints.
Heading out of the game was fine, but heading back in Epic Games Store asked me to update the game - which was funny, as the game's set to Auto-Update, at least according to the launcher, and I certainly didn't exit out of the client. Just a few bugs to iron out...
While Epic Games Store won't win any awards for design, useability, or function, I could at least click on Metro Exodus in my library, download and install it, and play it with mostly no complaints. Would I prefer to have the game on Steam? Heck yes, but as I don't right now, Epic isn't the worst thing in the world. I can play Metro Exodus fine, which is all that matters. Hopefully it won't go wrong though, because I don't see any technical support pages...
