Metro 2039 turns Hunter, the Spartan who sent Artyom to Polis, into the Metro’s dictator

In Metro 2033, Hunter was the Spartan ranger who left Artyom with a message for Polis and then walked off into the dark. Metro 2039 brings him back as the man in charge. The underground factions of Moscow’s metro have united under a single regime, the Novoreich, and Hunter is its Führer. The new protagonist, a recluse known only as the Stranger, is heading back down into the system Hunter now runs.

Metro 2039 is developed by 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. It launches on February 4, 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, through Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, with February 5 the date in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. It is the fourth main game in the series, after Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light and Metro Exodus, and it is again a single-player, story-driven first-person shooter. Andriy Shevchenko is the creative director, with Pavel Ulmer, the lead audio designer, as co-creative director and Jon Bloch as executive producer. The game was announced in April 2026, with its first look at the Xbox First Look presentation on April 16.

The Stranger is a break with the past. Artyom, the hero of the first three games, stayed silent while you played him. The Stranger is fully voiced. He is a former elite Spartan with a dark history, plagued by violent nightmares, who swore he would never return to the Metro. His search takes him toward a Novoreich fortress built inside a dam on Moscow’s surface. The regime keeps its stations in line with propaganda and misinformation, and the story, in 4A’s words, is about choices, consequences and the cost of securing a future.

The trailer above is Renegade, a two-minute gameplay trailer that 4A Games premiered at Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25, 2026. Everything in it was captured in-game. It follows the Stranger from daily life in Sevastopolskaya station to the irradiated surface of Moscow, switching between stealth and open firefights as he infiltrates the occupied city, and it fills in some of the past he is running from.

The game’s first console footage aired at PlayStation’s State of Play on September 3, captured on a PS5 Pro, where Metro 2039 will run with ray tracing at 60 frames per second in a dedicated Performance Mode. That presentation showed the Shatun rifle for silenced headshots, the Duplet shotgun and Molotov cocktails, along with the series’ usual survival chores: managing radiation and keeping your equipment working. Earlier previews pointed to scarce ammunition, a gas mask visor you have to wipe clean of grime and a wristwatch that shows how much oxygen you have left. The game runs on 4A’s own engine, with ray-traced global illumination and reflections built for current consoles and PC.

The darker tone has a source. 4A Games is a Ukrainian studio that works mainly from Kyiv and Malta, and its leads have said the story they planned changed after 2022. “When Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it brought war to our doorsteps, and we had to change our approach about what kind of story we wanted to tell,” Bloch told IGN in August. Shevchenko framed the themes as the cost of silence, the horrors of tyranny and the price of freedom, and told Game Informer that the game will go “where the worst of humanity will be on full display.” The Metro universe began with Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novels, and the games have always used a nuclear-ruined Moscow to talk about the people who survive in it.

Pre-orders open later in 2026. Deep Silver has not announced prices yet, but it has revealed a Collector’s Edition that, for the first time in the series, includes a physical replica: the Stranger’s battle-scarred Spartan helmet. What 4A Games has not said is how open the world will be. Metro Exodus moved the series onto large surface sandboxes, and the footage of Metro 2039 so far is split between tight tunnels and ruined streets, which leaves the shape of its levels as the main open question before February.

Tags: gaming, 4A Games, Deep Silver, first-person shooters, Metro 2039, Metro Exodus