Aja on 15/6/2025 at 17:14

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I played through Metro: Awakening this week, and for the most part I loved it. Reading Steam reviews you'd never know that it's polished and beautiful with great voice acting, a mature, well-written story, probably the best weapon handling I've ever experienced in VR, and a detailed, atmospheric soundscape. I'm kind of flabbergasted that it's sitting at Mixed. Makes me want to grab VR Gamers by the collar and give them a sobering shake. On the one hand, I get it: it's not flatscreen Metro. But by now we should be used to scaled-down VR versions of big titles, and as far as they go, this is at the top, alongside Horizon: Call of the Mountain. Rather than write an essay, I wanted to just point out a few things:


* The weapon handling is, as I said, incredibly good. Closest I would say is maybe Into the Radius, but when I went back to that game, I realized I liked Metro's a bit more. Grabbing clips and pulling slides always works like you expect, with good feedback. You can pull a clip halfway out to check if there's bullets in it, or partially rack a slide to check if a bullet is chambered. It feels so cool. They also nailed the weight, aiming, and sound/haptic feedback.
* Unlike the mainline Metro games (or at least 2033), enemies actually react to being hit (I assume they're using the excellent Arizona Sunshine IK tech here), and it makes shootouts so much more satisfying.
* Stealth works! I even detect hints of Thief in the types of barks enemies have (I swear one of them said "Must've been nothing"). It's not flawless, but you do have a lightgem on your wrist, and you can distract guards not only by throwing bottles but also spent magazines or health vials. I wasn't successful in stealthing my way through the entire game, but I believe it's possible (monster sections aside). The AI is fairly well tuned in that you can definitely hide in the dark but not with impunity.
* Gameplay wise there are a few different types (maybe stop reading if you're super spoiler averse): shootout/stealth sections with humans, monster shootouts, spider encounters, walk-n-talks, and railgun sections. A couple of these do get overused a bit, and by the end of the eight-hour campaign I was ready for it be done. But despite what the Steam reviews say, it's a minor blip on a mostly well-paced game, and the interesting story carries it along in spite of some repetitive mechanics. The human sections were the best; I could play an entire game of just that.
* There's a lot of attention to detail. Your gun glows red if you fire too fast. You can pour out vodka. When you walk into an open space, the sound gets deader, and when you move back to a corridor it becomes echoey. The devs clearly put a lot of effort in.
* I think it's a very nice looking game, with moody, contrasty lighting and well-designed environments. But I do take VR Gamers' point that it doesn't have as much variety as it maybe should. I've come to expect that in smaller-budget VR games, though, and I can't really knock the devs for staying in scope.


So Metro: highly recommended even if you're not a fan of the originals (or maybe especially if? Because I've never cared for them). If Vertigo Games is able to pass some of this knowledge to Maze Theory for their upcoming Thief game, I think it could actually be better than we're all expecting.

Thirith on 15/7/2025 at 07:01

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Nice, thanks for the heads-up!