Blood and Truth: PSVR Review

Blood and Truth: PSVR Review

Developed by London Studio
Platform: PSVR

If Blood and Truth were a Hollywood blockbuster, it'd be laughed out of the building for hitting every genre cliche it employs.

However, in the VR world, what Blood and Truth does is second to none, redefining what's expected of a first party product, and making the VR world an action movie arena. It's in the transplanting of the tropes and seeing how the VR's moulded to the genre that makes it so thrilling.

It may sound like hyperbole, and granted, some of its Move capabilities are limited, but the scope and ambition of Blood And Truth makes it a VR game for the ages, a disposably fun and frenetic take on the Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Move controllers ideology.

You are Ryan Marks, who's called back from Iraq when his father's killed. Thrust back into the London underground world, with a takeover threatening the family business, it's up to Ryan to spring into action and reclaim what his family is owed.

The plot's fairly incidental, a love letter to both gang warfare films and an extension of the London Heist which kicked off the first VR craze.

But what Blood and Truth does is create a FPS experience that's as adrenaline-filled as it is addictive.
It may occasionally struggle with some VR components (tracking goes a bit wild, and climbing ladders and scaling through ducts is trickier with controllers) but largely, Blood And Truth's commitment to putting you in the environment is where it succeeds.

Movement's limited, in that you move from one allocated spot to another, but while it's a direct path in some ways, its idea of being a shooting gallery seems to build on the success of Until Dawn: Rush of Blood.

But by placing you in the right environments and giving you a gun, as well as tools to get about, it's akin to the old school arcade shooters where you'd inhabit a game for a few hours, until the machine robbed you of all your cash.

Sometimes, the cliche is a bit too much to bear in Blood And Truth - some voicework is repetitive, villains are cardboard cutouts and shooting occasionally misses the mark.

However, those moments are met by moments which allow you to jump slow-mo out of a window during a mission, giving you the chance to look around as you leap; and moments like carrying on a shoot out while mixing DJ tracks from a sounddesk.

There's a lot to love in Blood and Truth, and while the game's cliches are what begins to wear it down as the experience continues, Blood and Truth's action movie moves and knowing winks to the genre are what will keep you coming back for more.