Blood & Truth
Developer/publisher SIE (London Studio) Format PSVR Release Out now
PSVR
What’s your weapon of choice? For us it’s always been the pump-action shotgun, but we can’t abide Blood & Truth’s implementation of it. It’s all risk and too little reward. What has always been, to us, the purest expression of the super-soldier power fantasy is transformed by virtual reality into, well, reality. This is what would happen if you put a pump-action shotty into our reallife hands and dropped us in a battlefield: we’d miss the first shot, remember we had to pump before letting off the second slug, then miss with that as well. Cut to teary family members at our funeral, then fade to black.
This happens time and again in the six or so hours that comprise Blood & Truth’s campaign. The first time we happen upon an assault rifle an hour or so into the game, we feel a thrill at the thought of videogaming’s Old Reliable being in our hands at last. But you know those holographic sights that, in regular FPS games, make lining up headshots a breeze? They don’t even appear unless you’re holding the gun correctly, and we most certainly are not. And sniper rifles? Forget it. Surrendering your peripheral vision for a difficult allor-nothing shot is asking for trouble. And the dozens of cockerney goons of the opposition are only too happy to provide it, typically while shouting something unkind about your proficiency with a weapon.
Happily, Blood & Truth does not insist you learn the ins and outs of every gun in the game. Pickups are strewn about with liberal cheer; sure, it might insist you start a mission with nought but a silenced pistol in your hand, but within minutes you’ll have a revolver on your right hip, a machine pistol on your left and, if you’re anything like us, a submachine gun slung over each shoulder. We’ve never really taken to SMGs; in so many other games they feel like a halfway house between assault rifle and shotgun, the sweet spot in their effective range easily covered by other options and the extremes of it outclassed by the alternatives. Here they are tremendously satisfying and absolutely devastating, especially when dual wielded. We like to pretend it’s because now the gun’s in our virtual hands, we can control the recoil. In truth it’s probably because SIE London Studio realised that scoped and pump-action weapons are a bit fiddly, and bestowed unto us a laser.
If this all seems like too much talk about guns, then forgive us. But Blood & Truth is defined by them; at its core this is an on-rails shooter with supplementary minigames posing as mechanics. It is a sort of Operation Wolf VR, albeit one with climbing, and lockpicking, and clipboards that you can throw away after you’ve read them. These pace-breakers are designed to ensure you don’t get tired of the gunplay that comprises the meat of the game: a few seconds of Move controller twist and turn to plant some C4, breach a door, light a fuse or pan CCTV cameras. More involved are the circuit puzzles you solve to bypass security on a door or alarm system, though even these are just simple lock-and-key conundrums, just with multiples of each in play.
These interactions are simple because the story demands it: special-forces soldiers don’t struggle to pick a lock. You are Ryan Marks, a retired member of the SAS who gets sucked into a gangland drama after the death of his father, who was an underworld kingpin. No sooner is his body in the ground than a rival firm makes a move on the family business, and only you, as Marks, can see them and their mysterious backers off. Prerelease, the natural comparison was the work of Guy Richie, and there are enough instances of ‘fack’ here to back it up. But it lacks the absurdist wit of the Lock, Stock director at his best. The readier comparison is the work of Jason Statham: Marks is a reluctant hero in a war he did not ask for, but is bloody well going to win.
The developer has always downplayed the Richie association, in fairness, but it has played up a comparison to John Wick. While the tricks you can perform using the Move controls – a gunslinger’s pistol twirl, say, or the ability to throw a clip in the air then jam the chamber down on it for a snazzy reload – aren’t quite the equal of the reference material, the game gets a lot closer during the on-rails set-pieces that close out many of its missions. Here the standard click-to-move navigation is abandoned as Marks auto-sprints his way out through dozens of grunts; all you need to do is aim, fire and reload from time to time. It’s more than a little silly – a lack of head-bob, no doubt due to comfort concerns, makes you feel like you’re riding a shopping trolley – but these sections provide some of the game’s most memorable moments, especially when they end with you jumping off a ledge just before a building collapses, or out of a window into the London night before a minigun cuts you down.
There are problems, most of them caused by the ageing tech in the PS Move controllers. Sudden tracking problems leave your hands in the wrong places, and given that hands is all you are – Marks’ body is not represented in-game – that’s jarring in the extreme. During the frequent climbing sections (sometimes up a sheer wall, at many others along monkey bars) the game often misreads our inputs or even desyncs entirely, one of the only causes of nausea in an otherwise highly comfortable game. We’ve had a few hard crashes, too.
But the whole thing is such fun, and any lingering concerns melt away as you clear out a plush apartment building with SMG fire while a grime banger thunders out of the nearby speaker system. Despite the big budget, SIE London Studio has approached Blood & Truth with a modest ambition: to make you feel special, and strong, and more than a little silly, in a love letter to the city it calls home. It has done so with a flourish.
At its core this is an on-rails shooter with supplementary minigames posing as mechanics
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