Now Playing: Metro Awakening (VR)

I’ve played and reviewed all of the previous Metro games on this blog so it seemed a shame not to give this VR spin-off a go, even though this is a series I’ve found as frustrating as I do enjoyable. And Metro Awakening certainly doesn’t buck the trend. In this VR prequel to the previous Metro games you play as Serdar, a doctor who embarks upon a quest within the Metro to find his missing wife.

From a story point of view, I think there’s a decent narrative here to enjoy that serves as an origin story to a character fans of the previous games will be familiar with. Also familiar is what awaits you in the dark and dangerous tunnels – mutants, hostile humans and supernatural threats. Awakening doesn’t really offer anything new to the Metro experience – it just gives you a new medium (VR) through which to experience it.

As a VR experience though, I’d say Awakening is a little lacking. My main issue is the brightness. This might sound like a strange complaint, but hear me out – Awakening is far too dark, even with the brightness cranked up to max. Like previous Metro games there are sections against human enemies where stealth is a viable (and preferable to conserve resources) option.

But in Awakening, some of these sections are so dark you literally cannot see a thing. Nothing. All you see is pure black and using your headlamp only gives you away. There were times I was within a couple of feet of an enemy and I simply could not see them. Navigating the darkness is a key facet of this series but it shouldn’t result in a situation whereby it’s impossible for the player to see or understand what’s happening.

Like the previous Metro games you do have a headlamp but also like those games the headlamp needs to be continually recharged. That’s fine when you can just press a button but in VR, you have to take out your backpack, grab the charging device and then manually wind it. It wouldn’t be so bad if the battery didn’t seem to die every ten minutes or so.

Inventory management is also pretty annoying. You have to reach over your left shoulder for your backpack which includes your lighter, gas mask, and charger, but over your right shoulder for your primary weapon selection. Both are slow to do, which isn’t ideal when you need to quickly switch weapons or pull on your gas mask.

That’s not to say there aren’t any nice little VR touches – the first time my gas mask fogged up I instinctively reached up and wiped it clean with my hand and it just worked. It was a nice surprise and made me realise just how immersed I was in the experience.

In addition to cranking up the brightness to max I’d also recommend switching on the ‘arachnophobia mode’ regardless of how you feel about spiders. They’re by far the most annoying enemy in the game as they leap at you from dark corners and land on your face, completely obscuring your vision.

You can try knocking them off with your hands but I often also accidentality pulled off my gas mask at the same time. Like the issue with the darkness, it’s not fun in VR when you can’t see shit, Captain. Aside from the spiders there are only two other mutant enemies you’ll encounter – one of which has this annoying ‘stagger’ animation when first shot that makes subsequent hits meaningless until the animation is compete, at which point you can shoot them again to finish the job.

The other mutant is mostly reserved for the initially fun but repeated far too often ‘train car chase’ sequences in which a horde of them pursue you as you race down a track on a mounted gun. Tip: equip your gas mask before departing because it’ll save you fumbling with your backpack as you go.

Human enemies are the most fun to fight because they do more than just charge wildly at you. They do try to use cover and flank you and because I found stealth such a chore due to the brightness issue, I mostly just shot my way through every hostile group I came across.

And I’m glad I did, because the combat is actually pretty fun. You have three primary weapons – an assault rifle, shotgun and crossbow. The crossbow kind of sucks because it’s a nightmare to aim in VR, but the others are good fun and handle well.

Visually, Awakening looks good. Not great. The character models are a little poor but the environments look nice, even if some of them end up too dark to fully appreciate. The early levels are rather slow but fortunately, the game picks up the pace around chapter three and keeps you engaged until the very end. And I’d say it does stick the landing, at least narratively speaking.

I do wish there was more taken from the previous Metro games – like the bullet economy or weapon upgrades. There’s no trading in the game, no shops and little in the way of character interaction. The Metro games are as much about the people as the environment, but Awakening doesn’t do much with what little supporting cast it has.

It took me about nine hours to complete Awakening and although I can’t say I loved every minute, I can say I still came away with a pretty positive impression. It’s a flawed, but fun VR experience that like the previous Metro games, I found as frustrating as I did enjoyable but I’d still recommend checking out.

7/10

Steam Spring Next Fest 2026 (Part 1/2)

First up was Shift at Midnight which is a fun twist on the ‘retail simulator’ genre. You can play solo – and to be fair, it’s quite fun solo too – or with up to three friends. You work the night shift at a gas station and must keep things clean, tidy and restocked as you serve your customers. So far, so much like the other retail simulators we’ve seen released over the last few years.

The twist here is that not all of your customers are human and you must inspect and question each of them to decide if they’re actually a doppelgänger. If you think they are, you can pull out a gun and shoot them. If not, you can let them pay and leave safely. There’s a daily store quota to reach, so you can’t shoot everyone just to be safe, and there’s no immediate penalty to letting a suspected doppelgänger walk out of the station.

But if you do let one or more doppelgängers leave they’ll return in their monstrous form at the end of your shift and attempt to murder you and your friends. You get a warning and a little time to prepare various traps and barricades to slow and hurt the creatures with the goal of driving them away. It’s a simple, quirky little game that will be more randomised in the full release, but this demo only had three scripted shifts to try. I played it through with a friend and we certainly had fun with it. It’s hard to say what kind of long term replay value it will have, but if appropriately priced, I can see this doing quite well.

The demo for Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! gave me the impression of a fun, if somewhat limited, first person shooter in which you get to join the Mobile Infantry and fight an endless horde of bugs. This demo featured a single mission on a fairly large map with multiple objectives, each of which you can approach in your own order. The objectives range from defending a base, to evacuating civilians, to collecting an arms cache . . . but really they all involve going to a place and killing a hell of a lot of bugs. It’s rather mindless and repetitive but, as I said, also rather fun.

You have access to weapons like your standard assault rifle and shotgun, but there’s also turrets to man and even an exoskeleton to ride. There are also support items you can use to call down deadly area of effect attacks – handy for dealing with a swarm. I played on the default Normal and found it to be way too easy. You get ranked at the end of the mission and difficulty does factor into your score so that’s clearly a way they’re pushing replay value. The visuals are . . . I wouldn’t say bad.

They’ve gone for a very distinct, colourful style that works better in some ways than others. The bugs look great but your fellow humans are essentially just 2D sprites and they just look . . . goofy. Maybe that’s intentional, but I can’t say I cared for it. Whilst the shooting is fairly solid, the movement makes you feel like you’re skating across the map. Not sure I cared for that, either. I do like the effort they’ve put in to capture the spirit of the movie, even giving us cheesy FMV sequences. Overall, not a bad demo but I can’t say I’m quite sold on the game.

Wanderburg is a surprisingly addictive ‘minimalist’ (low budget) roguelike set in a silly medieval world where castles have wheels and can roll around the world ‘consuming’ resources in order to evolve into the most powerful. It’s a bit like ‘Mortal Engines: The Game’. The demo only featured a single map with only a default selection of abilities and equipment. Nevertheless, I played it several times and had quite a bit of fun doing so.

As your little castle trundles around the map and defeats enemies you collect coins that eventually unlock upgrades, new abilities and equipment and eventually level up your castle into a bigger, meaner version. As times goes on, the map throws more and more enemies at you that range from simple groups of archers (that you can roll right on over) to large, hulking fortresses that demolish everything in their path.

Eventually the map throws a ‘Boss’ castle at you and even if you deal with that you will, inevitably, be overwhelmed at which point your castle will be destroyed and you’ll need to start all over again from scratch. You’re scored on the time you survived and the coins you collected. The map in this demo was rather simple, and I’m curious if other maps will be more or less the same just with a different biome.

I’m also curious about possible cosmetic unlocks for your castle. It feels like there’s some fun and engaging ways they could incentivise repeat play here. One to keep an eye on.

Someone once said: ‘What if Jet Set Radio but . . . trains?’ And so we have Denshattack! It takes the exuberant visual and audio style of Jet Set Radio with a dash of Tony Hawk style score attack as you grind, flip, trick and race your way as a . . . train! Yes, as a train! You might think that couldn’t work, but you’d be wrong!

The demo for Denshattack! was super fun to play. There’s a short but welcome tutorial before the game lets you take a crack at two full levels. They’re linear in the sense that your goal is to get from A to B as fast as possible whilst also racking up as high a score as possible, but each also features multiple pathways and optional objectives to complete, giving you a reason to replay.

The game is fast, colourful and I appreciated the unique little moments of each level – such as riding atop a Ferris wheel or escaping a lava pit. The camera remains locked behind you most of the time, but occasionally shifts for cinematic trick moments.

There are different trains to unlock and various cosmetic options to customise your ride. The only thing I had a little trouble with was the trick control system which felt a tad finicky to handle but maybe I just needed more practice. Denshattack! is pure video game – simple concept, executed brilliantly.