Voices in the Metro.
If there was one series I feel could benefit from VR, it’s Metro. VR can often enhance your immersion with a game, especially as everything is fully around you and you’ll use your hands to perform actions that are just not possible with a controller. Metro 2033 has been one of the only games to truly immerse me in its world, largely because of the tactile nature of its mechanics and its breathtaking yet claustrophobic world.
When Metro Awakening was revealed, I was curious who would handle the developmental chores of bringing this world to life. Vertigo Games was my ideal pick and thankfully, it turned out to be them. While Arizona Sunshine II was a fairly enjoyable experience, it was how Vertigo Games played in their VR sandbox that was rather impressive, especially with an intuitive reload system and interactivity in its world. It wasn’t amazing, but the refinements they have made here with Metro are rather impressive, even if the typical VR jank is present across its roughly 8-10 hours.
While Arizona Sunshine was more comical in its approach to its world and the setting of a zombie apocalypse, Metro is quite the opposite. Metro’s world is bleak, lonely, and terrifying, as death stalks you throughout the metro and beyond. It’s a series of games that showcased 4A Games a premier studio, delivering incredible worlds, characters, and set pieces. While this is Vertigo Games’ first attempt at working within the Metro landscape, they do it with a sense of confidence as if they have lived there all along.
Set a few years before the events of Metro 2033, you take on the role of Serdar, a doctor who lives amongst a small community within the metro. His wife, Yana, suffers from psychosis, and she admits to Serdar that she has stopped taking her medication, mainly due to her dead son’s voice luring her into the metro. Wanting to do right by Yana, Serdar treks into the metro to find more medication to alleviate her from this unfortunate illness. However, upon his return, Yana has disappeared into the metro to seek out her son.
While the story does dive into some unexpected moments, there are connections to the later games that series veterans will be able to understand the context, so while it isn’t essential to play the previous games before this, you may find a few moments of its story to hit a bit more with that added context. Regardless, Vertigo Games, who worked very closely with Metro creator, Dmitry Glukhovsky, has crafted a fine enough story that works well with the adventure crafted here, especially as VR experiences usually see their stories watered down and limited. That said, I wasn’t always engaged with the story as while the moments with Yana are nicely executed with some impressive voice work, the more supernatural elements to the story don’t always pay off.
Vertigo does a great job at building its world. The settlements are cramped and makeshift with small living spaces that feel like they could barely house an individual, let alone a family. The small community of people you meet in the game’s opening moments are friendly with the doctor, sharing in some small moments should you spare the time. However, returning to the settlement after your attempt to find Yana’s medication then shifts the game into what Metro fans relish. As you then begin to search the metro, you’ll encounter mutant rats, giant monsters, and the most evil of all things; man. Oh, and spiders but holy hell, F those guys.
While mutants will be on the menu, a great deal of your time will be taking part in set pieces where you’ll have to contend with other survivors, members of other factions the series faithful will recall. While you can stealth through many of these sequences, some of the typical VR issues with movement or being unable to teleport properly can often get in the way and trigger an all-out gun fight. That said, the AI may be fine enough to detect your headlamp and pay attention to noise, but they can’t stop from piling into a room one after another and just getting killed as you line up headshot after headshot.
While you won’t have a huge arsenal of weapons, those you do have function well enough in VR. You’ll need to reload each clip, pull back on various parts of the gun to load said ammunition, and then pop the clips to lock in more ammo to keep up. Granted, while you can discharge the clip, you can simply drag a new clip from your chest and it will tend to the rest. Still, the responsive feel of the guns and the fact that the ammo will dynamically swap to what you need can help in crucial moments when you are fighting for your life. Sure, there are times when your motions won’t match what is happening on screen as you accidentally grab the gun instead of pulling the chamber back or accidentally pulling out your backpack instead of the healing injector, but once you start to figure out the best ways to move, you’ll sort out those issues pretty quickly.
Shooting feels solid with the pistol and the bolt gun especially standing out. The rifle and shotgun feel as if there is too much recoil or that the gun will move around frantically as you hold down the trigger, especially with the rifle. Still, if you hold the front of the rifle while another hand on the trigger, you can relieve some of that recoil and find that your aiming will dramatically improve. I appreciate that Vertigo Games has allowed you to finally choose if you want the gun to remain in your hand despite not holding the button down as this was an issue I had with Arizona Sunshine II. I also appreciate the settings to allow for seating or standing, with more settings to really allow everyone to take part.
Metro is a series baked in with immersion, and Vertigo Games has implemented a few mechanics that could only feel this good in VR. On your pack, you’ll have a charger. This will be used to charge your flashlight as well as used to power up conduit panels to unlock doors as well as powering the tram carts within the metro. To power your flashlight, you’ll simply grab the charger and then grab onto the crank and rotate it around quickly to power it up. While this remains true for the doors and the tram, you’ll need to pull a series of wires out and connect them to the nodes on each device. It’s a silly and basic thing, but the requirement of having to crank this charger is somehow extremely satisfying.
The act of handling so many weapons and objects could have bogged down this experience, but having nearly everything attached to your pack was a smart call. You can reach over your left shoulder to pull the pack out. This will convey how much ammo you have, as well as sort out things like your gasmask, filters, grenades, charger, and your lighter, the latter of which is needed to burn away the cobwebs that you’ll encounter later on, complete with a bunch of asshole spiders that I swear are bulletproof. Your healing injector is on your left hip, your pistol on the right, and your weapon’s pack is over your right shoulder, which is how you’ll swap between your rifle and boltgun. Now, you’ll need to use your left hand over that right shoulder to grab the pack as using your right hand will pull your rifle out of that pack. While it can feel like a lot to take in, you’ll tend to these actions pretty frequently, allowing you to find the rhythm to pull off such feats in the heat of combat.
One aspect of Metro: Awakening that works well is that you have to manually eye up how much ammo you have in a clip. You can pop a clip out to glance or tilt the rifle to check your remaining reserves, or in the case of the bolt gun, each bolt has a glowing pin that makes it easy to tell what you have left in the barrel. The shotgun has nicely colored red shells and its fully exposed chamber makes it easy to convey what you have left to rely on. You can also pick up the guns off the fallen, either to use or to retrieve the clips for future use, or sometimes both. I would often grab both guns and huddle around a corner, protecting my flank and then unloading both borrowed guns each time they would file in one after another. A quick swap to a new borrowed gun, and repeat.
If I had to fault Awakening in one aspect of its combat, it would be the knockout melee attack. I found that either it wouldn’t connect well enough, that I would get too close to the enemy and they would detect me, or that the idle animation for them wouldn’t be long enough for me to approach them. I had numerous times where I was punching into their skull and it just wouldn’t register. While knocking them out is fine enough, I really wish I was allowed to drag the bodies away so that they wouldn’t be found, enhancing my stealth and making it easier for me to attack from the shadows.
VR games can impress visually or often disappoint, given how their visuals need to be rendered to maintain a steady framerate. While Arizona Sunshine II was fine for what it provided, Metro: Awakening is a huge step up with some great-looking character models and environments that are rather great. There are some bland and blurry textures here and there, but all in all, Vertigo Games has produced one of the best-looking VR titles to date, with maybe only Half Life: Alyx being the frontrunner for that particular award.
Performance-wise, I had one single crash but a lot of clipping into the environment, especially in vents. You’ll often get close to a wall and the whole screen will turn orange. This happened a great number of times. While a reload will always fix the clipping issue, some checkpoints are shockingly far back, especially when you die and have to retread not only a few areas, sometimes filled with monsters or people, but also the locked doors where you’ll need to use the charger to reopen.
Vertigo Games may be new to the Metro lifestyle, but they pull it off with a confidence that really shows through. The VR touches to bring the series to VR are masterfully handled with only the occasional VR jank issue rearing its ugly head. The story may not always impress, but the tense firefights and threats around every corner really perform a lot of the heavy lifting. Metro: Awakening is a standout title for the PSVR2 and while that isn’t saying a lot given its barren catalog, it’s still a solid outing nonetheless and a great Metro game to boot.
Developer - Vertigo Games.
Publisher - Vertigo Games, Deep Silver. Released - November 5th, 2024. Available On - PS5/PSVR 2, Meta Quest, Windows. Rated - (M) - Blood, Strong Language, Use of Drugs, Violence. Platform Reviewed - PSVR 2. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.