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The tone of the plot summary strays a bit from being neutral. That's the only thing that caught my eye in this article. To whoever tagged this article for cleanup, what other reasons were there? It's not a big article... 71.233.13.147 (talk) 20:44, 13 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well could someone at least paraphrase it? This is it from a previous revision:
The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilization have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend.
More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, and Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is one day visited by his step-father's friend Hunter whom plans to investigate the new threat, known as the Dark Ones. Before he leaves, he gives Artyom a modified rifle cartridge and tells Artyom to go to the central city of polis and find a man named Melnik should he not return by morning. When Hunter fails to come back, Artyom begins his journey. After travelling across the Metro, eventually, Artyom arrives at Polis and meets Melnik, a respected stalker, soldiers who venture onto the poisoned surface. They try to warn the Polis leaders of the threat of the Dark Ones, whom appear to be the next step in evolution and hell bent on destroying humanity. But Polis gives no official support. Given a mission by the scholars of Polis, Artyom and Melnik, along with a junior scholar named Daniel, travel to the Great Library to retrieve a special book. Unable to find the book, Daniel gives Aryom an envelope containing maps and details about a nearby missile facility. Believing that the Dark Ones are hivelike, the scholars posited a hive near Botanic Garden's station. Gathering a small company of stalkers, as well as a former Missile Man, they travel through the fabled Metro 2, fighting cannibals and sentient slime. The group splits up in the tunnel leading to the facility, with Artyom and a stalker named Ulman sent to access the surface and climb Ostankino Tower to scout out the hive, so that Melnik's group can destroy it. Artyom does so and finishes setting up the targeting machine, only to be snared in an intense dream. Artyom is shown images of the Dark Ones, accessing their hive mind to discover that what to the humans see as an attack was merely an attempt to communicate. After receiving this vision, Artyom awakes just in time to watch the missiles destroy the hive. An exhausted Artyom then decides to return to the Metro, his home.
