Metro Awakening Review (PC-Genie)
Personally I don't understand the hate that this game is getting. I'm a long time metro fan and been using VR for the past 3-ish years. Since i started VR I've always craved this kind of experience for a vr fps, a grounded, serious fps with a solid narrative.
Starting off with game play, Its very fun so far. Plenty of interactions with you inventory. You can take your backpack off and put on your mask, you can connect your charger to terminals and charge them. you can take enemies weapons and put them on your weapon sling. Manual reloads, Competent enemies, using mounted turrets, etc. I've taken my time, I've played around 9 hours and I'm on chapter 5 (a couple hrs the game was on standby). So far a very quality feeling vr experience, voice acting is great, performance is great around 85% of the time although scenes with dynamic shadows tank performance heavily (hoping this will get fixed in patches). Atmosphere and sound design are A tier, especially for a vr game.
Graphics. This game just looks great. I'm running it on quest 3 PCVR via virtual desktop. I7 7700k RTX 2070 Super; resolution and graphics ultra. The game looks crisp, most the textures (with some uncommon exceptions ie. some machinery) look high resolution, with PBR and bump mapping, which makes the textures look even better when the lighting hits just right. The environments each feel lived in and used, with lots of small details, most aren't interactable but for this type of game i don't feel its necessary to have every object be physical.
I'm seeing people comparing this games art style to that of the Metro Redux versions. This game clearly takes artistic inspiration from Metro Exodus. This being a VR game they cant cram as many details as they can the flat versions because then it'd definitely perform bad considering youre rendering it twice. I feel like this comparison isn't fair considering the entire franchise had a change in design.
The weapons. They also feel great, with plenty of additions from the main franchise and they function exactly how you'd expect, enemies have their own cosmetic variants which you can switch to if you like. As a metro fan I'm a bit disapointed that we don't see the Bastard SMG (despite it literally being fired off screen with the same sounds from 2033 at one point). As I'm only in chapter 5 i cant say whether I've seen every gun yet, i know the shambler is here but I'm thinking most the other fun guns from the main games got scrapped. I'm positive every metro fan would want to use the "Bastard" and the "Azbats" guns in VR.
Enemies. They're competent and challenging, conserving your ammo as always is to your benefit. humans arent just static they patrol, have conversations, even interact with their environment. They alert and communicate to each other. Mutants are manageable one on one but in numbers they're a challenge, they try and flank and jump on you.
Overall id say this game is a must buy if you like games like Half Life Alyx and Vertigo 2. Its a complete experience which looks and feels quality, its not exclusive to any one brand of hardware which makes it ultra accessible. They had the writer of the books on board for development and can tell. Passion and character put into this game, and for a vr game its rare. While its not perfect and it probably wont meet your exact expectations, it does so much right that this game will become a VR classic.