Metro Awakening review: "Some good moments but the lack of variety thins the reward over time"

Realizing you're trapped in a small corridor and there's something with a lot of teeth in the walls waiting to jump out at you is Metro Awakening at its VR best. The panicked head spinning, the shaky gun whipping around in your watery torch beam – if the previous Metro games built an impressively dour take on an underground apocalypse, this makes you live it as you rummage through your pack for the tools you need to avoid ending up as giant mutant rat food.

When Awakening choses to channel Metro's tunnel based shootouts – either against monsters or murderous survivors – it does a good job of bringing that style of action to life within VR. Peeking out from behind cover as you click clack another magazine into a rusty AK-47 held together with tape and hope is always a satisfying feeling. While the tension of creeping around claustrophobic corridors, when you know there's something in there with you, creates some great horror moments too.

There's a pleasing physicality to the most basic functions here as you reach up to wipe condensation from your gas mask, for example. Or furiously hand crank your little generator to charge your fading torch. One of life's greatest gaming pleasures I've discovered while playing Metro is pulling back the slide on your pistol to chamber a round (or cracking it a half inch just to check you have already). These little things pull you into the world in a very tactile way as you bring out your pack to check supplies, reorder weapons, and grab what you need. Even pressing a button over your head to flick your headlamp on and off never stops being fun.

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Despite a slow start, the opening hours feel about as good as a Metro game in VR could get. However, as things move on, the game veers away from the enjoyable gunplay and horror it seems to have cracked so well. Instead, lengthy expositional moments abound, where it feels like there's far too much walking and talking for a game famously about shooting people in the face with lethal air rifles (which disappointingly don't appear here at all).

The developer, the excellent Arizona Sunshine's Vertigo Games, clearly knows how to make a good VR shooter, but here that seems to slowly take a back seat to the story. I get it to some degree. After all, when the actual author of the original books, Dmitry Glukhovsky, gets involved with writing the story, you are going to want to use that. But it leaves this feeling like an action focused game that doesn't really have the tools to articulate Glukhovsky's ideas.

So while the opening hours feel very Metro as you fight and explore through rail tunnels, you eventually spend more and more time walking and talking as the game tries to flesh out its narrative, largely through things like radio conversations, flashbacks, and visions. I won't spoil the story here (although the team have openly talked about it being the origin prequel for a specific Metro character) but it doesn't feel like this is the best way of telling it. There's a heavily introspective and spiritual journey here with some depth to it, and building out some chunky lore, that doesn't feel best served by a man largely having conversations by himself in empty corridors.

The attempt to lever Glukhovsky's tale into this VR shooter has a strange effect on the pacing and flow overall. For a series known for its stealth – in the non-VR games you're often destroying lights to create shadows, or shooting ball bearings to quietly pop enemy skulls – there's very little of that here. When stealth is initially introduced, via the medium of "punching people in the back of the head", it's unsatisfying and unwieldy; something that never really feels good as you try to work out how hard to waft your hand around to register a hit. You don't even get a stealth weapon until surprisingly late on, a fun but sorely underutilized crossbow. There are a few oil lamps you can turn on or off but, aside from one level-specific contrivance, they feel more like an easter egg than anything else.

When you're running around – ducking for cover, scrabbling through the bodies or stripping enemy weapons for a handful of bullets – combat feels good. So it's a shame that stealth doesn't really utilize it well. The smaller space makes it hard to really do too much in the way of stealth kills without being immediately seen, so you often feel more lucky than skillful if you do get away with it. There are dedicated stealth-like sections but these are strange, pattern based moments where ghosts move between different points leaving you to find the gaps between them. They don't seem to see or react to you, they just kill you if you get too close. It's an unsatisfying and unclear replacement to systematically hunting and preying on enemies from the darkness.

Spooky action

It's a game of diminishing returns. You never leave the tunnels for one thing, so the smaller areas and lack of visual variety soon start to grate. The supernatural elements also introduce almost time loop-like revisits through certain areas. That starts feeling like it might take things in an interesting direction at first, but quickly end up feeling like canny asset management. A section where you're trapped in a repeating maze, listening for faint singing to guide the way isn't fun the first time, and definitely didn't need to come back again for no clear reason. It doesn't help that, with the limited environments, there were at least two points where I only found out it was a repeated section because the voice over told me.

By the closing hours it's mostly avoiding looping ghosts and exposition, which feels anticlimactic. There are some big action beats but they feel specifically engineered to balance the story excess, and often revolve around big set piece battles against monster hordes. These also expose the limitations of the otherwise enjoyable practical physicality of the controls. Against people, where you have time and space to think, reload or switch weapons, all that is easy. Against monsters that just rush you head on, it quickly falls apart as you flail around trying to clearly grab the thing you need with a creature right in your face. The Shambler shotgun is a particular pain here, needing to be reloaded at arms length to avoid accidentally grabbing the bolt that ejects casings.

I really wanted to like Metro Awakening a lot more than I did. But it feels pulled between two pillars – one that's about creating a great VR shooter, and one that's about trying to tell a lore critical canon story from the original creator. Because it tries to do the latter using only the tools of the former, it fails to some degree on both fronts. I like the idea of the story, but getting it as monologues and conversations, or occasional disconnected visions, while walking through tunnels, didn't really do it any justice. And, at the same time, this all gets in the way of the shooter side, creating an odd pacing, and a strange distribution of both action and weapons.

There are good moments to be had here, with some strong action and gunplay. That first monster encounter is likely to remain burned in my brain for a while to come. But, while those early gloriously physical, bullet-scrounging gunfights feel great, the lack of variety thins the reward over time. And, by not picking a lane more clearly between enjoyable VR action shooter and deep, thinky philosophical story telling, Metro Awakening muddles the impact of both.

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