[PC] Metro Awakening VR review - a bite-sized Metro experience that hints at greatness but runs out of steam

[Aronus]

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!

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.

 

Metro Awakening VR review - a bite-sized Metro experience that hints at greatness but runs out of steam | Eurogamer.net