Metro Awakening VR review – a bite-sized Metro experience that hints at greatness but runs out of steam
Metro Awakening VR delivers some terrifying moments in its deep, thought-frightening story, but after a robust begin, repetitive ranges and pacing points kill most of its momentum.
Primarily based on its first few hours, Metro Awakening might be thought of fairly the challenger to Half-Life: Alyx’s VR crown. The very first thing you see as soon as the sport begins correct is a small room bursting at the seams with interactive physics objects that could be picked up, inspected and thrown at the partitions. Greater than that, although, they’ll work together with one another – throw a chess piece at the chess board for example and a number of items sat atop it will likely be knocked over. Drop a heavy e book on the keys of the piano within the nook and it’ll play the precise notes the e book landed on. Hell, there’s even a guitar you’ll be able to choose up and strum – and so far as I bear in mind, even Alyx didn’t have one of these!
Metro Awakening VR review
- Developer: Vertigo Video games
- Writer: Vertigo Video games
- Platform: Performed on PSVR 2 and Steam VR
- Availability: Out now on PC (Steam), PSVR 2 and Meta Quest (Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest Professional)
As soon as you allow that room, there’s a small settlement to wander by means of with a couple of NPCs whose conversations you’ll be able to earwig on, assuming you”re not impatient to get to the motion, that is. That motion comes fairly rapidly, too – a quick set piece involving a booming mounted gun follows, which sees you mowing down waves of surprisingly sprightly Nosalis, earlier than you and a pair of fellow survivors rush to plant a bomb to seal the doorway the beasts are dashing in from.
It is just like the Metro collection in a nutshell, a ‘best hits’ theme park trip, if you’ll, and it’s a implausible opener for each newcomers to the collection and very long time followers. Because the hours go on, although, the cracks begin to seem. The quantity of interactive props begin to dwindle, the degrees themselves change into much less imaginative, and its pacing positively drops off a cliff. It quickly turns into fairly clear that, whereas there’s a good sport someplace right here in Metro Awakening, its greatest bits are entrance loaded at the beginning and, the deeper you get into its metaphorical metro tunnel, the additional away they change into.
Handle cookie settings
In contrast to earlier video games within the Metro collection, which targeted on the story of Artyom, in Awakening you play as Serdar, a personable physician whose cosy (as cosy as it may be in an apocalypse) existence is disrupted when his spouse Yana decides to cease taking the antipsychotics he prescribed her. Yana, you see, can hear the voice of her useless son. She’s satisfied he is calling to her from someplace inside the metro, but Serdar, ever the person of science, believes it’s simply a hallucination brought on by psychological sickness. This kicks off a story that’ll be acquainted to Metro followers – a fantastic combine of sci-fi and Russian superstition that posits questions on what occurs after we die, what are ghosts, and will reincarnation really be a factor?
Picture credit score: Vertigo Video games/Eurogamer
It is a plot that’s surprisingly deep and touching general, and there is a giant forged of characters whose lives (and afterlives) are personally affected by Serdar’s actions. Nevertheless, this additionally creates a sport of two halves in a lot of respects, as its heavy emphasis on story-telling usually feels at odds with its immersive, survival horror points. Need a sport with a wonderful philosophical narrative that’s deep and sluggish-paced? Certain, it is right here, but you have obtained some fairly terrifying and tense stealth sections to get by means of first if you are going to see it by means of to its conclusion, and vice versa. If you’d like each, good, that is completely the sport for you. But for me, at least, I discovered that being pulled backward and forward between static, ‘folks speaking at you’ sections and smaller, ‘waves of monsters leap at you from the darkish’ areas to be barely jarring. With a bit extra selection, each of these major threads might completely work collectively, but ultimately it simply makes Awakening a little too predictable.
The set-ups are nearly at all times the identical. For instance, if somebody is speaking to you in your ear, that almost at all times means you’ve obtained a lengthy part of strolling down corridors to take a seat by means of, with perhaps the occasional wheel to show or door to cost up. When nobody is speaking, likelihood is you’re about to hit enemy territory. Coming into a room with a load of ammo on a desk? Wave battle arising. On and on it goes, and none of it feels as contemporary and thrilling as a VR sport must be.
Picture credit score: Vertigo Video games/Eurogamer
In fact, Awakening can be a Metro sport beneath all that, and fortunately, developer Vertigo Video games has expertly translated the core Metro experience into digital actuality. The primary instrument in your subterranean adventures is your backpack, which you’ll often want to drag from both shoulder with the intention to entry your gadgets and weapons. Identical to within the flat video games, you additionally have to cost your head torch so that you don’t get misplaced within the darkness. Right here, although, slightly than squeezing a set off, you must wind a crank deal with on a small recharging machine. You bodily placed on – and take off – your gasoline masks too, as you do with the masks’s filters (though the latter is barely simplified so that you needn’t twist them into place as effectively). The masks additionally will get sweaty, and by shifting your hand in entrance of your face you’ll be able to wipe that off. It is easy but efficient, and provides brilliantly to the immersion – as does lifting your wrist to test your watch and see how a lot time the filter has left earlier than it runs out.
The 4 obtainable weapons are nice, too. They’re splendidly tactile to reload, as each has movable slides so you’ll be able to examine the interiors and see if there’s a bullet within the chamber. They’re enjoyable to fireplace, too, as all of them have a good punch to them, and holstering and unholstering them from my physique was not often aggravating. One of my favorite bits of VR immersion, although, got here from scavenging an enemy’s stays after a shootout. Wandering round, selecting up their weapons, taking out the magazines and stashing them in my chest to collect up all obtainable ammo felt cool and satisfymeing, and it gave me the most important feeling of ‘really being there’. One large distinction between Awakening and the flat Metro video games, although, is that there are not any distributors in Awakening, so that you needn’t fear about bullets being foreign money. You simply want to fret about them hitting your goal.
Picture credit score: Vertigo Video games/Eurogamer
Disappointingly, there are solely three monster sorts within the sport, and sadly no large boss fights or epic set items, which undoubtedly contributes to that repetitive feeling I discussed earlier. There are the small, rat-like Lurkers that both assault you individually or in waves; the big, additionally rat-like Nosalis that primarily assault in packs; and eventually some horrible spiders that leap at your face from the partitions and ceilings, but solely in sure radioactive sections. Every enemy sort strikes pretty quick in Awakening, which suggests aiming at and really hitting them could be pretty tough, particularly in the event that they’re making you leap after they seem.
The spiders are undoubtedly the worst offenders on this entrance, a lot so that ultimately I simply tried to run previous them as nailing kill pictures earlier than they jumped onto my masks was nearly not possible (and in case you don’t have any ammo left, you are nearly higher off simply reloading a checkpoint). The impact of the spiders crawling on you in VR is, admittedly, fairly cool, although – generally you will raise your hand to seek out one on the again of your wrist, different instances they will land on the again of your head and you will see their legs poke out into your area of imaginative and prescient. It is clearly going to be a nightmare for these with arachnophobia, but for me the creepiness died down after it had occurred a couple of instances.
Picture credit score: Vertigo Video games/Eurogamer
As soon as that scariness wears off, monster fights finally change into slightly repetitive, and my favorite bits of Awakening ended up being the fights towards the human characters. Regardless that these encounters have been fairly few and much between, you do have a bit extra alternative and company in the way you method them – positive, these selections principally boil right down to slowly and stealthily, or moving into all weapons blazing, but even that little bit of determination-making makes the entire thing really feel that far more immersive. With the monsters you are primarily locked in a small enviornment, attacked from all sides, but with the people there’s nearly at all times a little vent to cover in or a field to crouch behind. It felt refreshing to have these (admittedly small) moments of freedom, as a result of in any other case the sport is absolutely fairly linear and repetitive.
I get that an underground metro system is not going to be essentially the most visually attention-grabbing of locations, but Awakening’s stage design and story beats imply that you will revisit the identical few locations again and again, every time with fewer and fewer issues to do in them. For instance, there’s a Far Cry 3-fashion hallucinatory experience at one level, but it is clear you’re simply going alongside one more commonplace tunnel scene the sport’s used many instances earlier than – solely now it is populated by some floating candles and doorways in bizarre locations. In different Metro video games, you get to go exterior a bit, discover crashed planes and ruined buildings to offer you some selection. The extra you play Awakening, nonetheless, the extra you begin to realise how its particular person constructing blocks are merely being reskinned to offer the phantasm of one thing totally different. To be truthful, these are issues that most likely would not have bothered me as a lot in a flat Metro sport. In VR, although, when the world is throughout me and I am proper there up in its enterprise, they change into a lot extra noticeable and it yanks me out of the experience.
Picture credit score: Vertigo Video games/Eurogamer
Visually, there’s nonetheless a lot to admire right here, but character fashions and facial expressions can usually really feel a little stiff, and Awakening’s general sense of element is not as spectacular as one thing like Batman Arkham Shadow, for instance. Admittedly, I used to be enjoying Metro Awakening on the PSVR2 slightly than the Meta Quest 3, but this, too, got here with its personal issues. Mainly: the dreaded Mura impact from the PSVR 2’s OLED screens. I hardly discover the bizarre grainy impact of the OLED’s pixels in video games that have good vibrant graphics like Horizon Name of the Mountain, but in Awakening when every thing performs out in a low mild, it was not possible to disregard and made issues look slightly ugly. I’ve since performed the primary two hours once more on PC VR utilizing a linked Quest 3, and with that headset, every thing appeared spot on. It isn’t a sport breaker, but in case you personal each headsets, the Steam construct is the one you’ll need to put your face in.
Metro Awakening VR accessibility choices
Seated and standing play. Toggles for digital camera shake, interplay strains, vignetting, leaping, crouching, ladders and falling. Clean and teleport motion schemes and steady and blink turning. Subtitles.
On the topic of sport breakers, I bumped into a couple of exhausting crash bugs that got here out of nowhere close to the top of the sport, plus a bizarre freezing bug that solely occurred after pausing the sport for a whereas (akin to 5 minutes or extra) after which unpausing it. Apart from that, every thing was fairly strong and labored effectively – object interactions have been seamless, the sound design was nice (and doubtless one of Awakening’s excessive factors if I am trustworthy), and there is a enormous quantity of consolation settings. These embody the usual click on turns and teleportation motion schemes right down to a good seated mode and the power to customize issues like vignettes and ladder traversal. One possibility that was lacking, nonetheless, was the choice to play the sport within the Russian language, which I preferred to do within the different video games. As a substitute, it is simply the English language with some heavy Russian accents placed on high.
General, I did take pleasure in enjoying Metro Awakening, but I am undecided I would ever return to it once more (and positively not simply to seek out its collectible postcards). Its disappointing again half makes it exhausting to actually advocate, too. VR video games that continuously shock and delight are what I’m after – video games like Astrobot Rescue Mission, Boneworks, or Batman Arkham Shadow. But after a robust begin and a actually immersive interpretation of what it appears like to really ‘be’ down there these grungy, radioactive tunnels, Metro Awakening is finally a practice that slowly runs out of steam throughout its eight to 9-hour run time. Moderately than rise to the highest of the VR pile, Awakening by no means fairly breaks out from the center of the highway.
A duplicate of Metro Awakening VR was supplied for review by developer Vertigo Video games.