Blood & Truth
PSVR’s second wave kicks into gear with this stylish cockney shooter
PSVR
PlayStation VR Worlds served two very similar, but fundamentally different, purposes. For the early adopter of PSVR, Sony London Studio’s launch-day compendium of five shortform virtual-reality games was a generous, snackable spread that hinted at what an exciting new medium had to offer. For the studio, it meant getting a commercial return on a series of prototypes that it had devised while feeling around in the dark of a new, emerging technology.
“It was about London Studio getting to grips with the platform,” Stuart Whyte, director of VR product development at the studio, tells us. “Trying DualShock 4, Move and head-only control systems; trying things like The Deep, which was almost a fairground ride, through to more nuanced gameplaydepth stuff, and just exploring. It was the perfect opportunity to throw loads of demos at the wall and see which ones stuck, really.”
The stickiest of all was The London Heist, a 30-minute cockney-gangster caper that drew heavily from the Guy Ritchie style guide (sample line: “I’m gonna make bolognese out of that twat!”). It used head-tracking and dual Move controllers in intuitive, playful ways, and it went down well. Yet there was one loud, repeated criticism: there wasn’t enough of it.
Enter Blood & Truth, in which the ideas proven in The London Heist are iterated upon, added to and expanded into a full-length game. It casts you as Ryan Marks, an elite special-forces soldier who returns from a posting overseas to find his family under threat – a familiar setup, certainly, but one which untethers London Studio from the you-muggy-slaaags trappings of cockney gangsterdom. While the game is, like its spiritual predecessor, set amid the grit and glamour of modern-day London, and has a cast with accents to match, the desired tone this time is that of an action movie. The team cites as inspirations the mobile, graceful gunplay of John Wick; the spectacular setpieces of James Bond; and the light-hearted tone and improvisational style of Die Hard.
That’s certainly an enticing blend, and an all-too-brief session at Paris Games Week confirms that London Studio could well be onto something. Tonally, it’s intriguing enough, but it’s VR that truly sells the thing, elevating a set of familiar, even rudimentary mechanics into something intuitive, accessible and thoroughly enjoyable. Look at a waypoint and click the large central Move button and you’ll teleport there. Reaching the right-hand Move controller over to the holster on the left of your torso unholsters your weapon; you use your left hand to pull ammo clips from your belt, and snap them satisfyingly into place. While The London
Heist put a laser sight on your pistol so you always knew where you’d be firing, here it’s a holographic optic that can only be seen if you’re properly aiming down the barrel. It’s more difficult to line up shots, but all the more rewarding for it, and the change is offset by a friendlier reload system. In The London
Heist, you couldn’t put in a new clip until your current one was empty; here, you can do it whenever you like.
Those are the fundamentals, and will carry you through the whole game. Two face buttons can also be used to perform quick sidesteps left and right, however, to allow those who’d rather play the badass than star in a cautious cover shooter. Another optional button is used in gun tricks – reloading with a clip you’ve tossed into the air, for instance – to further ramp up the gun-fu fantasy. All these inputs, performed without a headset on, would be shown up for their obvious artifice, but here it really feels like you’re loading a gun, rather than bringing together two wands with great blobs of neon light on the end of them. “Action games are one of the biggest genres on PlayStation,” Whyte says, “But even the best games in the world are running on a screen, and that doesn’t immerse you in the same way that VR does. When you put on that headset, you get immersed for free.”
With that come other advantages – chiefly, the way a developer can make departures from a game’s core mechanical template without needing to explain every little thing. So, moments into our demo, when we arrive at the foot of a ladder, look up and see no waypoint at the top to teleport to, we simply understand what to do, and reach for the first rung. Later, we’ll crawl through a ventilation shaft, and flick through camera feeds at a CCTV monitoring station, panning and zooming using the knobs and dials we’re given. And when we spot our quarry getting into a lift, and head off to follow, we know just how to use it, with no ‘press X to call elevator’ prompt in sight.
Those little detours are designed as pace breakers for the gunplay, but it’s when the latter’s in full flow that Blood & Truth truly sings. The need to properly line up your shots adds an air of clumsy desperation to our first play through the level – think of the bit in Pulp Fiction where an assailant somehow manages to fire an entire clip at the air around Samuel L Jackson, and you’ve pretty much got us pegged. It’s funny, sure, adding a slapstick, madcap air to the action. But it motivates us, too, leaves us wanting to dive back in and get better.
The action builds to a climactic set-piece in which you sprint desperately through a casino building, with bad guys popping up everywhere, and while it feels a little like we’re riding a trolley it’s a frantic delight (though shooting nearby fire extinguishers slows the pace with a bullet-time effect). Yet the most intriguing moment comes when we finally corner our quarry, and aren’t entirely convinced he’s being honest with us. Midsentence, we shoot the floor between his legs, and he gives us a little more. We give him one in the shoulder, and he finally gives up the goods. Harsh, you might think, but give us a break – a colleague kneecapped him and put one between his eyes before he’d even said a word.
We’ve killed and maimed countless ne’erdo-wells in games over the years, of course, but once again it’s the headset that elevates this particular act of virtual violence. And it’s because of Blood & Truth that we leave Paris Games Week far more optimistic about PSVR’s future than we had been before it.
VR Worlds was the work of a studio tooling around to find out what works in VR; Blood &
Truth is the fruit of it. “One of the things that’s been really refreshing about the move to VR is the fact that, for years and years, as an industry we’ve refined the design language of games,” Whyte says. “A lot of those things just don’t work in VR, so we have to create a new design language for a new medium. That’s what makes it exciting. It also makes it an absolute bastard, because you can’t copy what’s come before.”
It really feels like you’re loading a gun, rather than bringing together two wands