Metro 2039 returns to Moscow tunnels with new protagonist

4A Games and Deep Silver have laid out the details on Metro 2039, the fourth mainline entry in the post-apocalyptic shooter series built on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels. It's due in February 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and Xbox on PC, with the story picking up four years after Metro Exodus, back down in the tunnels beneath Moscow.

New protagonist faces authoritarian Novoreich regime

Series regular Artyom is stepping aside this time. The new lead is the Stranger, a recluse pulled back into the Metro after swearing he'd never return, and haunted by violent nightmares from his past. He's also the first fully voiced protagonist the series has had, a shift 4A Games says was made to deepen the story's sense of immersion and let players engage more directly with his internal conflict.

What he finds down there has changed. The Metro's once-fractured station communities are now under one banner, the Novoreich, run by Hunter, once an officer in the Spartan Order now ruling as Fuhrer through propaganda, misinformation, and force. Expect resistance from both regime soldiers and the Metro's mutated threats, with combat leaning on the series' usual mix of stealth, scavenged weaponry, and resource management.

Real-world events shape darker narrative and 4A Engine tech

4A Games built the game across its Kyiv and Malta studios, and Creative Director Andriy Shevchenko has pointed to the war in Ukraine as a direct influence on the story's tone, pushing it toward themes of tyranny, resistance, and what conflict costs the people living through it. Glukhovsky has returned to collaborate on the script, keeping the tone tied to the books even as the game's story departs from them.

On the tech side, Metro 2039 runs on an updated build of the studio's proprietary 4A Engine, tuned for current-gen consoles and higher-end PCs. Level design goes back to the series' tighter tunnel layouts mixed with open station hubs, with the studio's "frozen stories" approach to environmental detail carrying much of the narrative weight, staging rooms and props so players can piece together what happened to the people who once lived there. The engine now supports real-time ray-traced global illumination, sharper specular reflections, and dynamic weather for the game's surface sequences.