Metro Awakening VR evaluation – why we can’t give the sport a rating

VR is a medium that’s still far from reaching its full potential, despite the best efforts of Sony, Apple, and Meta – even though the latter are two of the most powerful companies ever to exist. VR has the capacity to change entertainment forever, to make it feel as though you’re somewhere else. Your sight, hearing, and to an increasing extent touch, are transported to a fictional world in a way that’s impossible when you’re just looking at pictures on a screen. Even with today’s fairly primitive technology the effect is extraordinary.

You might think its problems are purely technical, given the inherent difficulties of translating hand and head movements into a virtual environment, but then you play a game like Batman: Arkham Shadow and realise those issues are entirely solvable. It’s not the medium that’s the problem, it’s the way games are implemented, and the low budgets VR developers are forced to work with.

With such a small installed userbase, compared with PC and traditional consoles, few developers have the money to make games of a high enough quality that it truly takes advantage of the medium. Half-Life: Alyx is one exception, and Sony’s various VR modes for their first party games another, but these exemplars are few and far between. Without more triple-A VR games, why buy a headset? It’s a classic chicken and egg problem.

This also brings us neatly to Metro Awakening, a great concept hamstrung by its delivery. Set in the richly textured world of Metro 2033’s novels and games, you’re one of the survivors in post-nuclear apocalypse Moscow, whose remaining inhabitants have taken to the underground train network to eke out their survival. Dark, grimy, and infested with savage irradiated mutants, life is far from easy. It’s a setting that lends itself almost perfectly to the immersion of VR.

Walking through a friendly encampment in an abandoned Muscovite metro station, you hear the thickly accented conversations and listen to the crackle of fires burning to keep people warm. You can almost smell it. Leaving the safety of the heavily defended station, venturing into the pitch black tunnels beyond, suddenly all you have for company is the narrow beam of your head torch and the distant howls or nearby scuffling of the horrors that lurk ahead.

It’s wonderfully atmospheric and, given that Metro Awakening is a story driven action game, really sets the tone. Unlike previous Metro games, that focused on a survivor called Artyom, here you play as Sedar, a doctor. His wife runs the station’s mushroom farm but has been hearing the voice of her long dead child, which has been pushing her towards mental breakdown.

You initially set off into the tunnels in search of medication for her, but you start to discover that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem. There are hints of the occult and what feel like dimensional shifts. You’ll make your way through a series of rooms and monster encounters, only to find yourself back at the beginning of a section, but with everything subtly altered.

Pathways are just a little different, monsters are absent, and you navigate through it with a growing realisation that your wife may not be ill after all. It’s a great premise, and really takes advantage of VR’s absorbing sense of place. Sadly, all that atmosphere, plot, and good intention is undone by technical problems that start small and end up game breaking.

Brilliantly, Awakening has no in-game menus, instead using your backpack to access your inventory. Reach your left hand to your left shoulder to swing it down and grab a gas mask for protection in areas of high radiation or your lighter or electrical charger – which not only powers your headlamp but also lets you activate circuits for the game’s minor environmental puzzles.

If you reach your right hand to your left shoulder, you’ll find a grenade and to your right, your Kalashnikov. At waist height, your right hand grabs your pistol and your left a medical syringe, while reaching towards your chest supplies you with fresh clips for whatever gun you’re holding.

In practice it’s far less complicated and more intuitive than it sounds and most of it works pretty well. Ironically, the most inconsistent elements are your pistol and medicine, both of which tend to be needed quickly when you’re in a tight spot.

Frantically grabbing air and aiming your empty hand at the snarling mutant in front of you is as frustrating as it is eventually comical. With the game’s extreme lack of ammunition, every encounter is knife edge, making problems detecting gestures considerably more frustrating than they would be in a more forgiving setting.

Familiarity also breeds contempt. Monster attacks are initially hugely disconcerting. Mutants skitter out of holes in the wall, lunging at you from the dark, the tiny circle of light from your head torch nowhere near enough to light an entire room, or see which ventilation duct or burrowed hole in the wall they might emerge from next.

The problem is that with so many attacks they become routine, and eventually boring, their frequency changing them from fear-inducing to mildly annoying, especially when you die needlessly because you failed to put a fresh magazine in your gun or couldn’t get hold of your medical syringe. Checkpoints are generous, but some fights are protracted, making them a chore to repeat when you die through no fault of your own.

Beyond the difficulties with motion-sensing there are endless bugs. On our first foray out of the station, into the tunnels, the guard encouraging us to test fire our pistol holds out an empty hand while repeatedly telling us to take a non-existent ammo clip. There are crashes to the PlayStation 5’s home screen, and the game also locks up, forcing you to return to the last checkpoint, a problem exacerbated by pausing, turning off the console and later resuming.

Our run finally ended when we needed to pick up a crossbow to continue. The onscreen message about how to holster it refused to disappear. After reloading the checkpoint a couple of times, then restarting the console, we had to concede defeat. With the holstering message plastered across the screen, the game wouldn’t even let us load bolts into the crossbow. Unarmed and unable to see, we were forced to give up.

It’s a shame, because Awakening’s setting and characters are promising, as is some of its action. Mutant encounters aren’t all that interesting but fighting groups of armed humans – always the real monsters – was more engaging. Ducking into vents, silently taking down some, while lobbing one of your hard-to-find grenades at others made for exciting and aggressive combat. Admittedly issues with the game’s gesture controls persisted, but you can sense the bones of a decent game under the bugs and budgetary constraints.

It wouldn’t be right to give a mark to a title we haven’t completed, but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be anyway to complete it. There’s a lot of promise on display in Metro Awakening VR, but on PlayStation VR2 at least, it’s not yet in a playable state.

Formats: PlayStation VR2 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £32.99
Publisher: Vertigo Games
Developer: Vertigo Games
Release Date: 7th November 2024
Age Rating: 16