Uzi

Lore & Background

In the post-apocalyptic world of the Metro, the surface is irradiated and the tunnels are a labyrinth of factions, mutants, and desperate survivors. Firearms are not mass-produced; they are scavenged from pre-war stockpiles, traded at exorbitant prices, or seized in skirmishes. The Uzi, with its short barrel and folding stock, fits the reality of tunnel life perfectly: it can be carried in a pack, drawn quickly in a narrow passage, and fired without the muzzle blast of a rifle shattering the fragile acoustics of a confined space. For a lone runner moving through the Dark Zone, where the air is thick with dust and the walls are lined with rusted pipes, a reliable semi-automatic SMG is often the difference between reaching the next station and becoming another body in the dark. Glukhovsky's novel treats weapons as characters in their own right—each one carries a history, a previous owner, a story of how it ended up in a particular hand. The Uzi in the Metro universe is no exception: it is a pre-war Israeli design that survived the nuclear exchange, its polymer frame and simple blowback action making it one of the more durable small arms in the tunnels. Unlike the heavier rifles that dominate the novel's combat scenes, the Uzi represents the quiet, personal violence of a world where most conflicts are fought at arm's length in corridors barely wide enough for two people to pass.

In Their Own Story

The corridor between the Dark Zone checkpoint and the next junction is only three metres wide. Artyom's breath fogs in the cold. He has the Uzi in his right hand, the magazine checked twice, the safety off. The sound of something dragging on concrete ahead is not human. He presses his back against the pipe-lined wall, listens. The Uzi is quiet—quieter than the Tokarev he left at the station. That matters here. In the tunnels, a rifle round echoes for a hundred metres and calls every mutant within earshot. A nine-millimetre crack is a cough. A whisper. He waits. The dragging stops. He does not. When it comes, he will fire and move, and the Uzi will do what it was built to do: put a round where it needs to be, in the dark, in the close, in the space between one breath and the next.

Reader's Guide

The Uzi is a 9 mm semi-automatic submachine gun encountered in the Dark Zone section of Metro 2033. It is a compact, blowback-operated weapon with a folding stock, designed for close-quarters engagement in the game's narrow tunnel environments. Because it fires in semi-automatic mode only, each trigger pull produces a single round, rewarding deliberate, aimed shots over spray-and-pray tactics. This makes magazine management critical: 9 mm ammunition is more common than 7.62 or 12 gauge, but still finite, and the Uzi's magazine holds a modest number of rounds, so players should conserve shots and favour head-level aim where possible. In the Dark Zone, the Uzi can be found as a pick-up on a workbench or in a storage locker; it is not a starting weapon, so players arriving from the earlier stations will need to acquire it or trade for it. Once in the inventory, the Uzi can be upgraded at a workbench with components such as an improved grip for reduced recoil, a longer barrel for modest range gains, and an extended magazine for additional capacity. These upgrades are optional but recommended if the player intends to rely on the Uzi through the mid-game. Lore-wise, the Uzi represents the tier of personal sidearms that tunnel dwellers keep for self-defence when a full rifle is too bulky or too loud for the situation. Its Israeli pre-war origin is a small nod to the global arms trade that existed before the bombs fell, and its presence in the Metro inventory underscores the novel's theme that the old world's violence persists in the new one, just in smaller, darker packages.

Did You Know?

• The Uzi in Metro 2033 is based on the real Uzi submachine gun designed by Uziel Gal in Israel in the 1940s–50s, a weapon still in service with numerous military and police units worldwide.
• In Metro 2033 the Uzi fires in semi-automatic mode only; there is no full-auto fire mode, which distinguishes it from some real-world Uzi variants that offer a select-fire option.
• The Uzi's compact dimensions make it one of the more practical weapons for the Metro's tunnel corridors, where space is tight and a long rifle is often unwieldy.
• Dmitry Glukhovsky's original 2002 novel references a variety of pre-war firearms carried by Metro inhabitants, and the Uzi fits the pattern of small, reliable sidearms that survived the nuclear exchange in the tunnels.