One of PlayStation’s in-house developers, SIE London Studios, has released a sequel to their PlayStation VR Worlds title The London Heist. Is this VR game worth your time, or is it just too hard on your eyes?

Read on to find out

SIE London Studios is Sony’s largest in-house developer in Europe and they have a long history of putting out some quality titles. They started out with NBA Shootout in 1996 and have long been on the forefront of emerging gaming technology. Their PS2 Eyetoy camera games were the precursor to the motion games we enjoy today and they released their first one back in 2003. We can still remember how impressed we were with the body tracking employed in Eye Toy Play. It would be over 6 years before XBOX even revealed their first motion games using a camera.

Fast forward to the latest generation of VR gaming, and London Studios was once again on the forefront when the PSVR first released. Their title PlayStation VR Worlds set the VR bar pretty high and showcased just about everything PlayStation’s flagship headset could do. That game is still the go to title for anyone wanting to try the PSVR out for the first time and it’s the title we always have folks try out first to let them get acclimated to the headset and introduce them to VR. One of the games within VR Worlds is called The London Heist and London Studios has taken that mini-game and extended it into a 4+ hour adventure that VR enthusiasts shouldn’t miss out on.

Taking The Heist to the Next Level

Blood & Truth VR picks up where the London Heist left off. You are in an undisclosed location, being interrogated by and unknown person. You are a soldier home for your father’s funeral, and it turns out your family’s business isn’t exactly legit. You aren’t part of the business, yet, but since it is your family, you’ll do what needs to be done in order for them and you to survive. With your father gone, and him being the former head of your family, your family’s position is ripe for a take-over and along comes an egotistical bloke to try to take over what your family has built. It’s really what we have come to expect in this world as a whole. Some idiot wants to swoop in and take what’s yours without doing any of the hard work for it. Screw that, let them eat lead.

The story plays out first in a flashback, with you saving another soldier that was being held captive, and then moves to the present where you’ll have to infiltrate different locations and complete different tasks, all the while sometimes sneaking and sometimes shooting your way through rooms. Your interactions with characters during not action scenes gives the game a real immersive feel and makes the game seem like it has zero cut scenes. The use of head tracking also means that the eyes of everyone in the room will follow you wherever you’re located. There are usually items that can be picked up and looked at, and even interacted with at times.

Real Life Action Hero

The gameplay for Blood & Truth is really a masterclass in the art of making an awesome VR experience. The game opens up by introducing you to the mechanics of a first person shooter taken to the next level with VR that sets it apart from every other FPS on the market. Reloading doesn’t require a simple button press, but the actual reloading motions of grabbing another magazine and slamming it home into your firearm. The haptic feedback of the move controllers takes those motions to the next level, in so much that you actually feel liker you are reloading your pistol, assault rifle, or shotgun. The pump action shotgun, while not my favorite due to having to rack that slide with every shot, was the most satisfying to use due to having to rack it every time.

One of the biggest issues most folks have with VR is motion. Blood & Truth uses a point and move from cover to cover system that can alleviate this issue with most users. Thes system makes for smooth transitions, even while blasting the bad guys during the move. The cover system itself is also effective, but beware that not all cover spots are created equal. We found ourselves out in the open once because the wood pallet we ducked behind disintegrated when the bad guys started blasting it. Always pay attention to the material of your cover. there are a few points where the gun battles will go from stationary to running, and the game will do the running for you. It’s a rolling gunfight where you’ll just have to focus on blasting all of the bad guys that pop up.

First Person Platforming

As long time gamers, we know that platforming has always been a part of most Action/Adventure titles and we were interested to see how Blood & Truth incorporated it. While there was no jumping around to speak of, there was climbing and it was actually pretty cool. There are a few ladders you’ll have to climb up, but it was the scaffolding and buildings we had to climb that impressed us. The game was very intuitive in that it showed you where you could and couldn’t grab, but that didn’t take away from the fun of traversing up a scaffolding, across beams, and through windows, all the while shooting the bad guys that want to kill you.

With SIE London Studios being a first party studio, it comes as no surprise that the VR quality for the game is as good as they come. They really pushed the headset to its limit in quality and action, and if other studios could reach this bar consistently, the future of the PSVR is very bright indeed.

If you own a PlayStation VR headset, you owe it to yourself to get this game. It is the VR action experience that everyone should play.

10

Blood & Truth review code provided by publisher and reviewed on a PS4 Pro. For more information on scoring, please read What our review scores really mean.