Despite reaching consumer hands in 2016, virtual reality still seems trapped in a perpetual infancy. The hardware of the headsets is being slowly iterated on, with new options like the Oculus Quest or the Valve Index releasing every handful of months. In the interim, major software releases have slowed to a crawl. It’s what makes something like SIE London Studio’s Blood & Truth somewhat exciting. Some money got thrown around to make, on paper, one of the most exciting VR action games available. However, it’s also one of the rare modern video games that feels completely stymied by the hardware it’s available on.
The game’s opening few segments do a great job of setting up both the world and conflict, as well as the gameplay loop for the rest of the game. British Special Forces agent Ryan Marks is our action hero, flung into his family’s business dealing with the criminal underbelly of London. He’s a capable soldier who cares deeply for his family: his tech-savvy sister, vaping dirtbag brother, and loving mother, thrust into the role of running the Marks’s criminal enterprise after the death of the family patriarch. Enter Anthony Sharp, a street tough turned real estate mogul looking to take over the Marks’s vast business interests with the backing of a mysterious organization.
On the mechanical side of things, the game feels like the next logical evolution of something like Time Crisis. Ryan moves through environments, point to point, shooting everyone who gets in his way. The guns, although your standard shooter selection of weapons, feel varied and reload in different ways to make using each one interesting. To take cover, instead of pressing a pedal on the floor like in Time Crisis, you have to physically move your head behind cover. It’s a very simplified physicality, but it’s a very fun experience.
The added layer of virtual reality goes a long way to making bouncing between cover points, popping your head up to fire a few rounds, and then ducking back as you reload exciting again. VR setpieces, interspersed through the levels occasionally change the point-to-point movement to a single, fluid track through an area, generally coupled with explosions and enemies jumping out to be shot at. While they’re nothing new to anyone who’s seen an action movie in the past 20 years, the verisimilitude of experiencing them in VR truly elevates it to new, thrilling heights.
Additional VR minigames, such as lockpicking, bypassing electrical circuits, or traversing vents are sprinkled throughout the levels. These minigames, much like the action, are dramatically simplified versions of real activities, but they still succeed at the game’s mission of making the player feel like an action hero.
Unfortunately, the camera and light tracking the PSVR uses to replicate your head and arms just isn’t consistent enough for the action, resulting in moments where lined up shots will miss due to the uncontrollable jitter of the Move controller occurring at just the wrong time. I could only play for bursts of 45 minutes to an hour and a half due to the nausea from the jittering head movements. The aforementioned climbing became an incredibly physical affair since occasionally the controllers wouldn’t recognize the motion of trying to move, resulting in a lot of exaggerated movements trying to progress.
The game's also pretty short, which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, less game does mean less having to deal with VR hardware problems. It also means that the game never quite overstays its welcome, moving at a brisk pace through setpieces just like an action movie. The level design facilitates this quite well, breaking up the high intensity action with moments of the more subtle minigames or VR conversation scenes with the Marks family. On the other, the game seems to end right as it starts to get going, ending on an awkward cliffhanger, complete with cliche "The End...?" in the credits.
Without the hardware limitations of the PSVR holding the game back, Blood & Truth would be one of the best examples to hold up as a game to show the world that virtual reality can handle something more akin to a big-budget action game. It’s exciting, it’s a blast to play, and it tells its story well enough. It’s just unfortunate that hardware can’t quite deliver on the promise of the software, resulting in just enough occasional frustration and discomfort to prevent the game from moving VR hardware adoption forward.