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First impression

I’ve been waiting for blockbuster movie-like PSVR game for a long time now. Blood & Truth promises me that and so did the good reviews. Still, I’m always little skeptical of any PSVR game, because the fact how the system overall works. I’ve been disappointed to many PSVR games due to the bad controls or the game not working properly. This, of course, might be just individual issues of the settings and environment you’re playing at, causing PSVR not to function properly. Anyhow, I got myself Blood & Truth, with high hopes.

Story

Ryan is a military man and comes back to home, London, after getting news of his father passing away. His family runs succesful not-so-ethical business empire and their family meeting goes south after high-profile gang members appear causing problems. Ryan goes after the gang with any means necessary. The plot is very movie-like and is told not-linearly. The story is more of Ryan being arrested and interrogated, telling his story and how things happened. The story is easy to follow, but might get confusing at some points when player have to play some unimportant and unrelevant events. All in all, the story is great and interesting, with thrilling turns of events that player propably won’t see coming.

Gameplay & Controls

It makes everything easier when player can only move to certain spots, being able to watch in every direction and move yourself to hide behind covers and come out to fire your gun. The Move controllers are mandatory, which is understandable of how the game is played; using two holdsters for two guns and one bigger weapon being on your back. Player also has to solve little puzzles, that are mostly the same; using a little utility pack to lockpick doors, cutting wires, setting a bomb or other technical hacking things.

It was dull that after moving to the next spot, I couldn’t go back anymore. I would’ve liked to search other alternative routes, but it seemed the developer wanted this to be played more than once. Also the checkpoints were too scarce, making me do the same difficult things over again to get to the point where I initially died. I noticed if my firepower and aiming were too bad, I could sneak situations through, but many times I had to face the fire to move to the next available spot.

The aiming is propably the worst thing in Blood & Truth, because (at least for me) it didn’t work that well. Many times when enemies were right in front of me I could aim them and empty full magazine and none of the bullets hit them. The aiming/shooting was made too precise for PSVR system, since the image quality of the headset’s screens are not completely sharp and clear, so trying to hit precisely someone is a way too hard, making the gameplay frustrating. With a bigger caliber weapon, holding it with two hands gave more accurancy, but it was also difficult to do, because many times I accidentally took the gun in other hand, confuse myself with the buttons and it became like a circus act moving a weapon from hand to hand. Changing gun to another was somewhat easy, but doing it in rough situation I usually died before reaching the other gun. Otherwise the controls worked fine, such as looking and moving around, grabbing objects and throwing things.

Graphics

This is a beautiful game in every aspect, being one of the realistic-looking PSVR games out there. All the characters looked nice and genuine and the facial movements were amazingly real. The surroundings, though, were sometimes bland and non-interesting, when sometimes everything around me was cool to look at. With most PSVR titles I’ve played I had issues with, basically everything. For example in one game I got stuck inside a door when trying to open it, with nothing helping it other than restarting the game, but again the situation was still the same as I got to the door. These kind of issues are very common in PSVR games, that the character goes through things or get stuck in or to an object. Blood & Truth having player to move only certain spots eliminates these kinds of issues and it worked; I never got stuck on anything.

Sound

When action sequences began the music turned into loud movie-like action-packed orchestra with blazing sound effects and explosions. It made everything so good and I felt like playing in a Hollywood movie. Everyone was brilliantly voice acted, even the character I played as. Usually first person characters are mute, for some reason, propably developer thinking it feels more personal experience if player won’t talk. I personally think it’s absolutely stupid, everyone should talk. Blood & Truth didn’t follow this dumb template and thankfully made Ryan talk, actually giving more personality to the experience.

Difficulty

Puzzles were mostly all the same, but little different each time. Lockpicking didn’t require absolute accurancy or any other task such as cutting wires, putting in a fuse, pushing buttons, searching for a passcode. These were the most things player have to do, making them feel just added there for versatility from shooting. Firing and aiming a gun was the most hardest I found to be. As I said somewhere above how accurantly player needs to aim, to actually hit a target. Them being afar made aiming to their heads for one-shot-kill was nearly impossible and going too near made them see you. I truly lost my patience few times and rage quitted the game, when I literally pointed the gun straight at the enemies standing in front of me and none of the bullets got them.

Last impression

Even if I saw lots of reviews praising this to get full points, I think it’s not. This is a great game with some good choices from the developer, but I think the downfall is the PSVR system itself. Through these years I’ve learned how difficult it is to get the PSVR system work perfectly and everything counts; too much light, too little light, etc. I can’t control all the lighting in my room, because of the nature light. If these kind of aiming dysfuntions won’t bother you in video games then you will love this game. I like this game, but I don’t believe I’ll play this more than once.

   

RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2019
GENRE: Action / Shooter / VR
DEVELOPER: SIE London Studios
PUBLISHER: Sony Interactive Entertainment
PLATFORMS: PlayStation 4

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