Based on its first few hours, Metro Awakening could be considered quite the challenger to Half-Life: Alyx’s VR crown. The first thing you see once the game starts proper is a small room bursting at the seams with interactive physics objects that can be picked up, inspected and thrown at the walls. More than that, though, they can interact with each other – throw a chess piece at the chess board for instance and multiple pieces sat atop it will be knocked over. Drop a heavy book on the keys of the piano in the corner and it will play the exact notes the book landed on. Hell, there’s even a guitar you can pick up and strum – and as far as I remember, even Alyx didn’t have one of those!
Metro Awakening VR reviewDeveloper: Vertigo GamesPublisher: Vertigo GamesPlatform: Played on PSVR 2 and Steam VRAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam), PSVR 2 and Meta Quest (Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest Pro)
Once you leave that room, there’s a small settlement to wander through with a couple of NPCs whose conversations you can earwig on, assuming you”re not impatient to get to the action, that is. That action comes pretty quickly, too – a short set piece involving a booming mounted gun follows, which sees you mowing down waves of surprisingly sprightly Nosalis, before you and a pair of fellow survivors rush to plant a bomb to seal the entrance the beasts are rushing in from.
It’s like the Metro series in a nutshell, a ‘greatest hits’ theme park ride, if you will, and it’s a fantastic opener for both newcomers to the series and long time fans. As the hours go on, though, the cracks start to appear. The number of interactive props start to dwindle, the levels themselves become less imaginative, and its pacing positively drops off a cliff. It soon becomes quite clear that, while there’s a good game somewhere here in Metro Awakening, its best bits are front loaded at the start and, the deeper you get into its metaphorical metro tunnel, the further away they become.
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Unlike previous games in the Metro series, which focused on the story of Artyom, in Awakening you play as Serdar, a personable doctor whose cosy (as cosy as it can be in an apocalypse) existence is disrupted when his wife Yana decides to stop taking the antipsychotics he prescribed her. Yana, you see, can hear the voice of her dead son. She’s convinced he’s calling to her from somewhere within the metro, but Serdar, ever the man of science, believes it’s just a hallucination caused by mental illness. This kicks off a story that’ll be familiar to Metro fans – a wonderful mix of sci-fi and Russian superstition that posits questions about what happens after we die, what are ghosts, and could reincarnation actually be a thing?
It’s a plot that’s surprisingly deep and touching overall, and there’s a large cast of characters whose lives (and afterlives) are personally affected by Serdar’s actions. However, this also creates a game of two halves in a lot of respects, as its heavy emphasis on story-telling often feels at odds with its immersive, survival horror aspects. Want a game with an excellent philosophical narrative that’s deep and slow-paced? Sure, it’s here, but you’ve got some pretty terrifying and tense stealth sections to get through first if you’re going to see it through to its conclusion, and vice versa. If you want both, perfect, this is absolutely the game for you. But for me, at least, I found that being pulled to and fro between static, ‘people talking at you’ sections and smaller, ‘waves of monsters jump at you from the dark’ areas to be slightly jarring. With a bit more variety, both of these main threads could absolutely work together, but in the end it just makes Awakening a little too predictable.