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Metro Awakening review | GamesRadar+

Umito November 6, 2024

Realizing you’re stuck in a small hallway and there’s something with lots of teeth in the walls waiting to jump out at you is Metro Awakening at its VR best. The panicked head spinning, the shaking gun spinning in the beam of your watery torch – if previous Metro games constructed an impressive, austere version of an underground apocalypse, this makes you experience it as you rummage through your bag for the tools you need to avoid ending. as food for giant mutant rats.

QUICK FACTS

Release date: November 7, 2024
Platform(s): PS VR2, Meta Quest, Steam VR
Promoter: Vertigo games
Editor: Deep Silver

When Awakening chooses to channel Metro’s tunnel-based shootouts – against monsters or murderous survivors – it does a good job of bringing that style of action to life in VR. Looking behind the cover while you click another magazine into a rusty AK-47 held together with duct tape and hope is always a satisfying feeling. While the tension of crawling through claustrophobic corridors, when you know there’s something in there with you, also creates some great moments of horror.

Metro Awakening review — (Image credit: Deep Silver)

The most basic functions here have a nice physical appearance when you’re wiping condensation off your gas mask, for example. Or furiously fire up your little generator to charge your fading torch. One of life’s greatest gaming pleasures that I discovered while playing Metro is pulling back the slide on your gun to chamber a cartridge (or breaking it half an inch just to check that you ‘have already done). These little things draw you into the world in a very tactile way as you pull out your bag to check supplies, rearrange weapons, and grab what you need. Even pressing a button above your head to turn your headlamp on and off never stops being fun.

There’s a nice physicality to VR as you wipe condensation off your gas mask or furiously fire up your little generator.

Despite a slow start, the opening hours look as good as a Metro game in VR could get. However, as things progress, the game moves away from the enjoyable gunplay and horror it seems to have cracked so well. Instead, long moments of exposition abound, where it feels like there’s far too much walking and talking for a famous game about shooting people in the face with rifles deadly compressed air guns (which, unfortunately, do not appear at all here).

The developer, Arizona Sunshine’s excellent Vertigo Games, clearly knows how to make a good VR shooter, but here that seems to gradually take a back seat to the story. I understand to a certain extent. After all, when the real author of the original books, Dmitry Glukhovsky, gets involved in writing the story, you’ll want to use him. But it feels like an action-focused game that doesn’t really have the tools to articulate Glukhovsky’s ideas.

Metro Awakening review

(Image credit: Deep Silver)

So while the opening hours feel very metropolitan as you fight and explore the train tunnels, you ultimately spend more and more time walking and talking as the game attempts to flesh out its narrative, largely at through elements such as radio conversations, flashbacks and visions. I won’t spoil the story here (even though the team has openly talked about it being the original prequel to a specific Metro character), but I don’t think it’s the best way to tell it. There’s a strongly introspective and spiritual journey here with some depth, and the building of a voluminous tradition, which doesn’t seem best served by a man largely having conversations alone in empty corridors.

Hands in hand

Everything you use in Metro Awakenings exists physically on a pack that you can pull out to check supplies, select tools, and change weapons. It works well for the most part but can crumble under pressure with a few selection areas requiring precision that’s hard to muster when a mutant has its head in its mouth.

The attempt to mine Glukhovsky’s story into this VR shooter has a strange effect on the pacing and overall flow. For a series known for its stealth – in non-VR games you’ll often destroy lights to create shadows, or shoot ball bearings to silently pop enemy skulls – there’s very little of that here. When stealth is initially introduced, via the means of “hitting people in the back of the head”, it is unsatisfying and cumbersome; something that never really feels good when you’re trying to figure out how far you can wave your hand to register a hit. You don’t even get a stealth weapon until very late, a fun but sorely underused crossbow. There are a few oil lamps that you can turn on or off, but, aside from a specific device on one level, they are more of an Easter egg than anything else.

When you’re running around – taking cover, rummaging through bodies, or taking out enemy weapons to collect a handful of bullets – combat feels good. So it’s a shame that stealth doesn’t really use it well. The smaller space makes it difficult to do too much in terms of stealth kills without immediately being seen, so you often feel more lucky than skillful if you get away with it. There are sections dedicated to stealth, but these are weird, pattern-based moments where ghosts move between different points, leaving you to find the spaces between them. They don’t seem to see you or react, they just kill you if you get too close. It is an unsatisfactory and unclear replacement for hunting and systematically hunting down enemies of the dark.

Scary action

Metro Awakening review

(Image credit: Deep Silver)

It’s a game of diminishing returns. You never leave the tunnels for a reason, so the smaller areas and lack of visual variety quickly start to irritate you. The supernatural elements also introduce almost time-loop revisits through certain areas. At first this feels like it could go in an interesting direction, but it quickly ends up looking like shrewd asset management. A section where you’re stuck in a repetitive maze, listening to faint chanting to guide you isn’t fun the first time around and certainly doesn’t need to come back for no clear reason. It doesn’t help that, with the limited environments, there were at least two moments where I found out it was a repeated section because the voiceover told me so.

At closing times it’s mostly about avoiding the looping ghosts and exhibits, which seems disappointing. There are some big action beats, but they seem specifically designed to balance out the excesses of the story and often revolve around big battles against hordes of monsters. These also expose the limits of the otherwise pleasant physical practicality of the controls. Against people, where you have time and space to think, reload or change weapons, this is all easy. Against monsters that rush you head-on, it quickly falls apart as you struggle to try and clearly grab the thing you need with a creature right in front of you. The Shambler Shotgun is a particular pain here, as it must be reloaded at arm’s length to avoid accidentally grabbing the bolt that ejects the casings.

Metro Awakening review

(Image credit: Deep Silver)

I really wanted to like Metro Awakening a lot more than I did. But it seems torn between two pillars – one which is about making a great VR shooter, and the other which is about trying to tell a canon story critical of the original creator. Because he tries to achieve the latter goal using only the tools of the former, he fails to some extent on both fronts. I like the idea of the story, but getting it in the form of monologues and conversations, or occasional disconnected visions, while walking through tunnels, didn’t really do it justice. And, at the same time, all of this hampers the shooter side, creating a strange rhythm and a strange distribution of action and weapons.

There are some good times to be had here, with action and strong shooting. That first encounter with a monster will probably stick with me for some time to come. But, while those gloriously physical, bullet-chasing early gunfights are enjoyable, the lack of variety weakens the reward over time. And, by not choosing a path more clearly between an enjoyable VR action shooter and a deep, thoughtful philosophical narrative, Metro Awakening blurs the impact of both.

Metro Awakening was tested on PS VR 2 with, with code provided by the publisher.

Want the series at its best? Check out our Metro Exodus Review for one of our favorites in this unique shooter. Want something else? OUR best FPS games have you covered!

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Metro Awakening review | GamesRadar+

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Metro Awakening review | GamesRadar+

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