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.

Now Playing: Hubris (VR)

Hubris is a VR sci-fi action game in which you play as a recruit of the ‘Order of Objectivity’ on a mission to locate the mysterious (and missing) Agent Cyana on a hostile alien world. Quite what the ‘OOO’ is or does isn’t entirely clear. In fact, from a story point of view, nothing is entirely clear.

Are the OOR the good guys or the bad guys? They do seem to wear a lot of black and give off Star Wars Imperial vibes. There’s another faction in the game that seems to be at war with them – I assume, given they keep trying to kill you. When you do locate Agent Cyana she seems to have special powers . . . which I think are related to the unique resource mined on the planet?

And her plan is to activate a planetary terraformer to do . . . something. You do learn what the something is but then you wonder if that really was the entire point of her mission. You’re accompanied on your adventure by Lucia, a pilot who talks to you via a drone. You’ll also meet the aforementioned Cyana (who doesn’t talk a whole lot) and a guy named Wack (who talks way too much).

I’m not going to say the story or character stuff is bad – it’s not. It’s . . . fine. I think the problem I have with it is: it’s not dull enough to make me not care. Rather, it’s decent enough to make me wish it was a lot better. And in a way, that kind of applies to the game as a whole.

Hubris is visually impressive, arguably one of the most visually impressive VR games you can play. And it’s undeniably ambitious – pushing hard on visuals, action, voice acting, platforming, swimming (more on that later) alien creatures, explosive shoot outs, upgradable weapons and even a (kind of bad, sadly) vehicle section.

I really do admire it for that. For what was likely a small team with a limited budget, they really wanted to deliver as close to a ‘AAA’ VR experience as possible. And I’d say they weren’t far off succeeding. The problem Hubris has is that nearly every aspect of it just doesn’t quite hit the mark.

The platforming is a little too janky – I actually died a few times glitching through the scenery when trying to climb or jump. The in-game item menu is neat visually (it projects from your wrist) but awkward to use. The shooting is fun enough, but there’s no real feedback to when you take a hit, so you have to continually check your health level to find out if you’ve taken damage.

There were times an enemy was behind me, shooting me out of my field of view, and I wasn’t even aware of it until I noticed my health was going down. And enemy AI is kind of terrible. They mostly just run at you. Sometimes they do take cover. Sometimes they just stare at a wall.

The swimming is . . . the swimming nearly made me want to quit the game at one point because I absolutely hated the swimming controls that require you to physically swing your arms. I found it slow, inaccurate and tiring. The enemy selection isn’t bad for the game length (about 6 hours on Normal difficulty) but there’s nothing particularly exciting here – you get alien squids, bugs, drones, homing mines, guy with gun and bigger guy with bigger gun.

The vehicle section is a nice surprise towards the end of the game but it also handles like ass. The voice acting is fine but . . . stilted, to say the least. You have a single weapon you can upgrade and switch between three modes – pistol, shotgun and a rapid fire ‘burstgun’ although the shotgun is pretty much useless.

Despite all the little (and big – swimming!) irritations, I can’t say I didn’t have a fun time playing through Hubris. Because there is a good game here – a potentially great game, in fact. It’s just a shame that it just falls short in so many areas. Like I said – it’s ambitious, and I admire it for that. And I’d love to play a more refined, more focused, more polished and considered sequel. I do feel there’s a lot of untapped potential here. If you see it on sale, be sure to give it a spin.

6/10

REPLACED (Demo)

REPLACED is a 2.5D cinematic action platformer set in an alternative 1980s cyberpunk style world. You play as R.E.A.C.H or just ‘Reach’, an artificial intelligence inhabiting a human body on a mission to escape and / or take down the sinister Phoenix Corporation that created you.

The demo was only about twenty minutes long and rather light on narrative, hence me somewhat lifting the Steam store page description. I can’t remember exactly when I first saw REPLACED – it must have been during a summer game show because I added it to my Steam Wishlist way back in June 2021. I’d honestly kind of forgotten about it, but then this demo suddenly appeared.

As I said, it’s only about twenty minutes but it does give you a sense of how REPLACED plays. You can run, jump and climb to progress your way through some very striking pixel art environments. This is a game going for a very ‘cinematic’ vibe through its visuals and I’d say it achieves its goal.

The demo is clearly from an early area of the game designed to serve as a tutorial with a few simple platform puzzles to ease you in and several small combat segments. Combat operates like a 2D version of the Batman Arkham games, with an alert icon appearing over an enemy about to attack giving you a chance to block and counter. Yellow alerts mean it’s safe to do so, Red alerts mean you need to dodge. Simple, but effective.

You have a basic attack and a gun that charges over time to perform stylish one shot counters. I don’t know if the game will introduce more weapons or different types of counters or attacks, but the basic foundation of the combat system is solid.

I think the most important thing I can say about this demo is that it left me wanting more. I love the gritty, moody look of it, the combat – though rather basic and easy – was still fun, and there’s an appropriating pounding synth-driven soundtrack pushing you on.

Will the game turn out to be more style than substance? Perhaps. I think it will likely live and die on its narrative aspects rather than its gameplay. The world. The characters. The story. If it can nail those, then we might have something pretty special.

Now Playing: No, I’m not a Human

I first played No, I’m not a Human as a demo during a Steam Next Fest last year, attracted to the unique visual style and intriguing concept. The idea is that something has gone ‘wrong’ with the sun, forcing everyone to stay indoors during the day. And at the same time, mysterious ‘Visitors’ have begun to appear, clawing their way out from beneath the ground.

The Visitors are violent and dangerous, seemingly intent purely on killing. They can mimic humans and attempt to persuade you – a hermit living in a small home on the outskirts of a town – to let them in. Every night you’ll hear knocks at your door and you’ll have to decide to let whoever is outside in or not.

You might think – well, why let anyone in at all? But there’s a scripted Visitor who appears regularly across the 13 days and nights of the game and will immediately enter and kill you if you’re alone. In fact, there’s a fair number of scripted interactions within the game. Whilst many of the characters you encounter are randomised, some are always scheduled to appear on exactly the same nights. Some are always human and some are always Visitors.

Most though, as I said, are randomised, so you can never be quite sure who will show up and who will be a Visitor or not. Just because one character was human in one playthrough, doesn’t mean they will be in the next. As you progress you’ll learn different ways to test your new house guests and if you suspect any of them are a Visitor you can immediately pull out a gun and blow them to pieces. But you won’t know for sure until you pull the trigger.

If they’re a Visitor, the game will let you know with a jump-scare style flash. If you made a mistake and they’re human, they just die. In some ways, I feel like it would be more interesting if you didn’t know for sure because at its heart, this is a game about paranoia. It’s a bit like ‘The Thing’ in which you begin to suspect everyone – even yourself.

You have limited ‘energy’ each day so you might not be able to test everyone to your satisfaction, although there are ways to boost and increase this. Visitors will target and kill humans in your home, increasing that sense of paranoia when you think you’ve tested everyone and are sure they’re all human, only to wake up and find someone dead.

Because those tests aren’t always totally accurate and that also plays into the sense of paranoia but also the idea of being manipulated by media and the Government, which is represented by FEMA who send a regular operative to your door to take people away for ‘testing’ and who broadcast televised updates regarding Visitor ‘signs’.

Neighbour turns on neighbour. Society breaks down. Innocent people die. The game doesn’t lean as hard into these angles as I’d like. As I said in my post on the demo, I feel like the game is more interesting in concept than in execution but nevertheless, it remains an engaging and intriguing and certainly a unique experience.

You can ‘complete’ No, I’m not a Human in about an hour or so, maybe shorter if you get killed early on but the game is designed for multiple runs so you can meet and explore the fairly large cast of weird characters who show up at your door. There are also multiple endings to unlock based on your actions and choices throughout the game.

Some are rather convoluted to say the least. Some are downright bizarre and silly. But given you can run through the game so quickly, you don’t mind doing so in order to see all the weird and wonderful outcomes it has to offer.

Visually the game has a striking and unique style both for environments and characters. There’s no VA, it’s all text based but it looks and sounds good. I’m still working my way through the game, exploring different options to see how things play out and I’m enjoying my time doing so. It’s a game I’d recommend if you’re looking for something a little out of the ordinary.

7/10

Marathon (BETA)

I can’t say I’m particularly interested in ‘extraction shooters’ and I wasn’t expecting Marathon to change that. But when it had an open beta recently (or ‘Server Slam’ as they called it) I figured it was worth a punt. You play as a ‘Runner’ who travels to the world of Tau Ceti IV to scavenge from the ruins of a derelict colony.

You can play solo (how I played) or with two friends. You choose your ‘shell’ which is essentially your class, each of which has a distinct visual style and a couple of unique special abilities. You then equip your gear and load into the map. Your goal is to loot what you can, complete any contracts you can and then extract from the map alive. If you die, you lose everything you’re carrying.

It’s not a gameplay loop I find particularly exciting and as I said, I didn’t expect Marathon to change that. I played the beta for about an hour and a half, completing several ‘runs’ and successfully extracting alive all but once. I killed a couple of other players I encountered – more on that later – but only died on a single run when I ran out of ammo fighting several robots.

The colony isn’t deserted but full of ‘UESC’ security droids who happily shoot on sight. Engaging them is risky for two reasons – one, it might alert other players to your location and two, it consumes your resources (ammo, health and shields) that might be needed if you encounter said other players.

Although if you do, given that the ‘shells’ themselves kind of look like robots, the first time I killed a player I just thought it was another NPC! I actually felt a little bad about it because I’m not sure they were hostile! The same thing happened with the second, who shot at me first and I assumed it was another security bot. I killed them, took their stuff and extracted. I didn’t feel so bad about that one!

The stuff you collect ranges from gear (weapons, ammo, equipment) to materials needed to trade for items, to currency, to junk that you can sell for more currency. You’ll likely have to spend some time figuring out what each category of item is, how valuable it is, and if it’s worth picking up – because your inventory space is limited, so you won’t be able to keep everything you find.

You have an active inventory that you take into the map with you and a ‘vault’ where you can store whatever you want to keep / are too afraid to lose. Aside from the simple loop of enter, loot and extract, there are ‘contracts’ to accept from the different factions vying for power on Tau Ceti IV. These are somewhat randomised missions along the lines of ‘kill X amount of enemies’ or ‘scan X location’.

There is a ‘story’ of sorts, told via these contracts and within the world itself through item descriptions and the environment. Does it really matter though? Eh, probably not! Visually, I really like the way Marathon looks. I like the style and the architecture but I also feel like it’s a potential weakness for the game going forward.

Even with my limited time with Marathon, every location on the map seemed to blur together. No area felt unique. It felt like I was traversing the same rooms, hallways and walkways no matter where I went and even though I like the way the game looked, I didn’t see the visual variety I’d need to keep me engaged. The enemies also all look very similar – at least the ones I encountered did.

And the UI? The UI is an absolute nightmare. I got the hang of using it fairly quickly, but none of it felt intuitive. It always felt like I was fighting against it. It’s just so . . . busy and muddled. When you have a full backpack of items on a run it looks like a convoluted mess of different colours and weird icons, a lot of which all look the same. The menu system is also pretty terrible.

I don’t see Marathon flopping at release the way other live service games have recently but it’s also hard to see how the long term player engagement will pan out. Even though Marathon isn’t my thing, there’s clearly a solid enough game here for fans of the genre, but I’m not sure there’s enough variety or hook here to keep them coming back. Not yet, at least. I’m curious to see how this one does. I won’t be picking it up, but I never expected to.