Metro 2039 received its first proper gameplay trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase on June 7, confirming a February 2027 release window across Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. The clip, titled “Hunter” and captured entirely in-game, runs nearly three minutes and takes players through the Moscow Metro tunnels under the Novoreich, a fascist faction whose self-declared Fuhrer has absorbed every surviving underground community into an authoritarian state built on propaganda, loudspeaker slogans, and the unfulfilled promise of surface access.
Developer 4A Games has spent seven years on the sequel while operating across Malta and Ukraine through power outages and air-raid sirens. The full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022 changed the game’s story. Metro 2039 inherits a franchise tradition of anti-war storytelling and carries it into the post-war consequences the series spent three games trying to avoid.
The Human Enemy
Players of the original Metro 2033 will recognize Hunter. He appeared in that 2010 game as a senior Spartan Ranger who set Artyom’s journey in motion, a soldier’s soldier respected in the tunnels. In Metro 2039, a direct sequel to Metro Exodus, he has declared himself Fuhrer. Hunter absorbed every surviving Metro faction under the Novoreich banner and built a propaganda apparatus saturating stations, tunnel walls, and public-address systems with compliance messaging. The game’s official description states that communities now live “flooded by propaganda and misinformation, suffering under his authoritarian regime.”
The game’s own text elaborates on his fall: “As part of the Spartan Order, Hunter was a legend, a high-ranking, experienced Ranger, who swore to protect the Metro. What’s left of the Spartan Order as he knew it lies in ruins.” The Spartan Order was the Metro’s closest approximation of a principled military institution, tasked with protecting tunnel communities from hostile forces and mutant threats. Hunter helped define what the Spartans meant in Metro 2033; his turn to fascism inverts that institution from within. The player character, The Stranger, believes Hunter has become the enemy the Spartans once existed to fight, and their conflict is personal in a way the Metro series’ prior antagonists were not.
A cinematic trailer released at the initial April 2026 reveal showed Novoreich soldiers loading children onto trains for ideological indoctrination, and a classroom sequence in which children with blank, featureless faces recite a compliance mantra. The Novoreich’s visual palette uses deep red and black. 4A has not softened any of this imagery in the June 7 gameplay follow-up, which retains the same political register throughout its three-minute runtime. Creative Director Andriy Shevchenko said at the April reveal that Metro 2039 would go “where the worst of humanity can be on full display.”
The Stranger is the first voiced protagonist in the Metro series’ main campaign. Artyom appeared as a silent figure across all three prior mainline games, his interior monologues limited to loading-screen journal readings. The Stranger breaks that tradition entirely; the game describes him as “consumed with anger and hatred, chastising the Fuhrer for his lies and hypocrisy.” He is characterized as a recluse plagued by violent nightmares who had left the Metro and is forced back in by circumstances the story hasn’t yet fully disclosed.
The Stranger Carries Different Weapons
The June 7 trailer confirmed the return of Metro’s core mechanics alongside named new additions. 4A describes the campaign as “close and claustrophobic stealth-action gameplay” with both underground tunnel sections and above-ground exploration in irradiated Moscow streets and open wasteland.
- The Shatun, a new stealth weapon that also functions as a breaching charge, giving players tools to break through barriers in both combat and exploration
- New mutant variants and expanded environmental interaction, with new ways to navigate and exploit the Metro’s geography shown in the footage
- New improvised and modified items across the survival inventory, continuing the series’ signature gear philosophy
- A return toward linear campaign design after Metro Exodus’s semi-open world approach across three distinct regions
A mechanic called Frozen Stories, announced at the original April reveal, replaces traditional NPC dialogue in portions of the game. Players discover story context by examining points of interest in the environment rather than through scripted conversations, pushing more of the narrative weight into the world itself. Publisher Deep Silver and 4A describe Metro 2039 as “a handcrafted, story-driven, singleplayer campaign.” Exodus introduced semi-open sections that the studio has stepped back from for this installment.
Metro 2039 is also the first Metro game designed from the ground up for current-generation hardware. Metro Exodus launched on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in February 2019 before receiving an Enhanced Edition update for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2021. The June 7 in-game footage, rendered natively rather than captured in a legacy mode, shows the environmental and lighting fidelity that the current hardware generation allows without an upgrade pass.
4A Games Made Metro 2039 in Wartime
The game went live for pre-purchase on Steam and the Epic Games Store alongside the showcase. That step arrived after years of production 4A has documented with unusual transparency.
Power Cuts and Air-Raid Sirens
Everything we had planned for the next chapter of Metro changed in 2022. As a Ukrainian studio, we’ve spent the last few years developing Metro 2039, with many of our team having to shelter from drone strikes and use batteries and generators to complete our work.
Jon Bloch, executive producer at 4A Games, wrote this in a PlayStation Blog post published at the April 2026 game reveal. The 4A Games 15th anniversary update on the studio’s own site, published in March 2025, added: “We do want to reassure you that work is continuing on both of our projects despite missile strikes, air-raid sirens, and terror still raining down on Ukraine.” One animator who contributed to the prior game died in a Ukrainian defense mission in late 2022, while Metro 2039 was already in production. The studio told players the game would “be ready when it’s ready” and continued working.
The Malta-Ukraine Development Split
4A Games was founded in Kyiv in 2006 by three developers who left GSC Game World, the Ukrainian studio behind S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. In 2014, 4A moved its headquarters to Sliema, Malta, retaining a Kyiv sub-studio that later became independently owned and rebranded as Reburn in February 2025. Reburn is now developing a separate title, La Quimera. Metro 2039 is being built by 4A Games Limited in Malta alongside developers still working inside Ukraine.
The team that made Metro 2033 in 2010 numbered around 60 people. More than 200 developers now work across both locations on Metro 2039. Shevchenko told reporters at the April reveal that the studio changed the story “to be even more about choices, actions, consequences and what you have to pay to have a future.”
Glukhovsky in Exile
The Metro series began as a novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, a Moscow-born author who published Metro 2033 as a free web serial in 2002 before it became a print book and the basis for the games. Metro 2039 is not an adaptation of one of his novels, but Glukhovsky collaborated with 4A on the story. The studio describes the narrative as “shaped by shared values of freedom and truth, and informed by the harsh realities of the world today.”
In March 2025, 4A released a video marking the series’ 15th anniversary that included a message from Glukhovsky to the team: “4A, you are amazing, I’m with you in whatever it takes.” He said this from outside Russia. Glukhovsky publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the outset, and a Russian court sentenced him to eight years in prison in absentia in 2023 for statements he made publicly about the war. He lives abroad and has not returned. 4A’s anniversary statement described his opposition as “a courageous decision for any Russian” and said the studio was “proud to have him as a friend and co-creator.”
The author is a Russian national writing Metro 2039 from exile. His government sentenced him for opposing its war against Ukraine. His collaborators at 4A developed the game through bombardment from that same government. Co-creative director Pavel Ulmer described the studio’s frame at the April reveal: “We are not romanticizing the post-apocalypse or making a theme park out of it. Metro has always been a more tragic view on our actions as humanity.”
The series had always carried political weight. Metro 2033 used nuclear apocalypse to explore post-Soviet dysfunction and Cold War anxiety. Metro: Last Light engaged questions of collective guilt. Exodus reached for something close to hope, pushing Artyom out of the tunnels and toward the open world. Metro 2039 contracts back toward the question Glukhovsky has lived in exile for raising: what a society does to the people who tell it the truth about what it’s doing.
Metro Exodus Built the Audience
Metro 2039 arrives with a commercial foundation built by its predecessor. Metro Exodus, released in February 2019 by publisher Deep Silver, reached the following milestones over five years, per VGChartz data compiled by Statista:
- 10 million copies sold as of February 2024, five years after release
- €58 million in revenue for publisher Deep Silver in its first quarter after launch
- 6 million copies sold by December 2021, three years post-release
VGChartz puts the full Metro series at 16.2 million units across all mainline titles and Redux reissues as of February 2024. The series launched with Metro 2033 in 2010, followed by Metro: Last Light in 2013 and Exodus in 2019. The gap between Exodus and Metro 2039 is the longest between any two mainline entries. Exodus accumulated its sales steadily through catalog availability and Xbox Game Pass access, reaching 10 million copies across five years. That long-tail audience is the base 4A is targeting with this installment.
Deep Silver operates under Plaion, part of Embracer Group, which acquired 4A Games in August 2020 for approximately $36 million through its Saber Interactive subsidiary. When Saber Interactive separated from Embracer in March 2024, 4A Games remained within the portfolio alongside Deep Silver and the series IP. The Metro 2039 “Hunter” gameplay reveal trailer from the Xbox Games Showcase is live. February 2027 is the confirmed window.
