GamesRadar+ VerdictThere’s a good VR game in Metro Awakening at times, but it feels pulled between its pleasing core combat and narrative ambitions it lacks the gameplay vocabulary to fully articulate. The lack of overall variety, and increased leaning on expositional filling over time, means that while it starts strong its impact fades with continued play.Pros+Good tactile combat+Great physicality to interactionsCons-Limited environmental variety-Muddled story telling
GamesRadar+ Verdict
GamesRadar+ Verdict
There’s a good VR game in Metro Awakening at times, but it feels pulled between its pleasing core combat and narrative ambitions it lacks the gameplay vocabulary to fully articulate. The lack of overall variety, and increased leaning on expositional filling over time, means that while it starts strong its impact fades with continued play.
There’s a good VR game in Metro Awakening at times, but it feels pulled between its pleasing core combat and narrative ambitions it lacks the gameplay vocabulary to fully articulate. The lack of overall variety, and increased leaning on expositional filling over time, means that while it starts strong its impact fades with continued play.
Pros+Good tactile combat+Great physicality to interactions
Good tactile combat
Great physicality to interactions
Cons-Limited environmental variety-Muddled story telling
Limited environmental variety
Muddled story telling
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Realizing you’re trapped in a small corridor and there’s something with a lot of teeth in the walls waiting to jump out at you is Metro Awakening at its VR best. The panicked head spinning, the shaky gun whipping around in your watery torch beam – if the previous Metro games built an impressively dour take on an underground apocalypse, this makes you live it as you rummage through your pack for the tools you need to avoid ending up as giant mutant rat food.
FAST FACTSRelease date:November 7, 2024Platform(s):PS VR2, Meta Quest, Steam VRDeveloper:Vertigo GamesPublisher:Deep Silver
FAST FACTS
Release date:November 7, 2024Platform(s):PS VR2, Meta Quest, Steam VRDeveloper:Vertigo GamesPublisher:Deep Silver
Release date:November 7, 2024Platform(s):PS VR2, Meta Quest, Steam VRDeveloper:Vertigo GamesPublisher:Deep Silver
When Awakening choses to channel Metro’s tunnel based shootouts – either against monsters or murderous survivors – it does a good job of bringing that style of action to life within VR. Peeking out from behind cover as you click clack another magazine into a rusty AK-47 held together with tape and hope is always a satisfying feeling. While the tension of creeping around claustrophobic corridors, when you know there’s something in there with you, creates some great horror moments too.
(Image credit: Deep Silver)
There’s a pleasing physicality to the most basic functions here as you reach up to wipe condensation from your gas mask, for example. Or furiously hand crank your little generator to charge your fading torch. One of life’s greatest gaming pleasures I’ve discovered while playing Metro is pulling back the slide on your pistol to chamber a round (or cracking it a half inch just to check you have already). These little things pull you into the world in a very tactile way as you bring out your pack to check supplies, reorder weapons, and grab what you need. Even pressing a button over your head to flick your headlamp on and off never stops being fun.
There’s a pleasing physicality in VR as you wipe condensation from your gas mask, or furiously hand crank your little generator
There’s a pleasing physicality in VR as you wipe condensation from your gas mask, or furiously hand crank your little generator
Despite a slow start, the opening hours feel about as good as a Metro game in VR could get. However, as things move on, the game veers away from the enjoyable gunplay and horror it seems to have cracked so well. Instead, lengthy expositional moments abound, where it feels like there’s far too much walking and talking for a game famously about shooting people in the face with lethal air rifles (which disappointingly don’t appear here at all).
The developer, the excellent Arizona Sunshine’s Vertigo Games, clearly knows how to make a good VR shooter, but here that seems to slowly take a back seat to the story. I get it to some degree. After all, when the actual author of the original books, Dmitry Glukhovsky, gets involved with writing the story, you are going to want to use that. But it leaves this feeling like an action focused game that doesn’t really have the tools to articulate Glukhovsky’s ideas.
(Image credit: Deep Silver)
Hands onEverything you use in Metro Awakenings exists physically on a pack you can pull out to check supplies, select tools, and change weapons. It works well for the most part but can fall apart under pressure with a few selection zones requiring a precision that’s hard to muster when a mutant has your head in its mouth.
Hands on
Everything you use in Metro Awakenings exists physically on a pack you can pull out to check supplies, select tools, and change weapons. It works well for the most part but can fall apart under pressure with a few selection zones requiring a precision that’s hard to muster when a mutant has your head in its mouth.
Everything you use in Metro Awakenings exists physically on a pack you can pull out to check supplies, select tools, and change weapons. It works well for the most part but can fall apart under pressure with a few selection zones requiring a precision that’s hard to muster when a mutant has your head in its mouth.
The attempt to lever Glukhovsky’s tale into this VR shooter has a strange effect on the pacing and flow overall. For a series known for its stealth – in the non-VR games you’re often destroying lights to create shadows, or shooting ball bearings to quietly pop enemy skulls – there’s very little of that here. When stealth is initially introduced, via the medium of “punching people in the back of the head”, it’s unsatisfying and unwieldy; something that never really feels good as you try to work out how hard to waft your hand around to register a hit. You don’t even get a stealth weapon until surprisingly late on, a fun but sorely underutilized crossbow. There are a few oil lamps you can turn on or off but, aside from one level-specific contrivance, they feel more like an easter egg than anything else.
When you’re running around – ducking for cover, scrabbling through the bodies or stripping enemy weapons for a handful of bullets – combat feels good. So it’s a shame that stealth doesn’t really utilize it well. The smaller space makes it hard to really do too much in the way of stealth kills without being immediately seen, so you often feel more lucky than skillful if you do get away with it. There are dedicated stealth-like sections but these are strange, pattern based moments where ghosts move between different points leaving you to find the gaps between them. They don’t seem to see or react to you, they just kill you if you get too close. It’s an unsatisfying and unclear replacement to systematically hunting and preying on enemies from the darkness.
Spooky action
(Image credit: Deep Silver)
It’s a game of diminishing returns. You never leave the tunnels for one thing, so the smaller areas and lack of visual variety soon start to grate. The supernatural elements also introduce almost time loop-like revisits through certain areas. That starts feeling like it might take things in an interesting direction at first, but quickly end up feeling like canny asset management. A section where you’re trapped in a repeating maze, listening for faint singing to guide the way isn’t fun the first time, and definitely didn’t need to come back again for no clear reason. It doesn’t help that, with the limited environments, there were at least two points where I only found out it was a repeated section because the voice over told me.
(Image credit: Deep Silver)
I really wanted to like Metro Awakening a lot more than I did. But it feels pulled between two pillars – one that’s about creating a great VR shooter, and one that’s about trying to tell a lore critical canon story from the original creator. Because it tries to do the latter using only the tools of the former, it fails to some degree on both fronts. I like theideaof the story, but getting it as monologues and conversations, or occasional disconnected visions, while walking through tunnels, didn’t really do it any justice. And, at the same time, this all gets in the way of the shooter side, creating an odd pacing, and a strange distribution of both action and weapons.
Disclaimer
Want the series at its best? Check out ourMetro Exodus reviewfor one of our favourites in this unique shooter. Up for something else? Ourbest FPS gameshave you covered!
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