A Crime & Punishment
HIGH The first game where checking the chamber of my gun has a skill ceiling.
LOW The “worm worm worm worm worm worm worm” scene.
WTF Five headshots and an enemy still gets back up. Really?!?
The Metro post-apocalyptic series set in an irradiated, ruined Russia is a perfect fit for a VR experience – its intimate encounters, unwieldy (yet powerful) weapons, and horror-adjacent vibes all suit VR well. Plus, Metro Awakening is by the folks behind classic VR hits like Arizona Sunshine and After The Fall. When it popped up on my radar, it sounded like a dream come true!
Mechanically, Awakening is a first-person shooter with stealth elements, light survival mechanics, and a emotionally compelling prequel story featuring one of the most beloved characters in the franchise, Khan.
Khan is an influential, mystically-inclined veteran of the titular Metro’s many struggles. After the bombs fell during World War 3, Khan was one of the few doctors still alive. Awakening focuses on showing how he went from a rational medical professional to the spiritualist most players first met in Metro 2033. There’s a lot of potential here that doesn’t get used, but it’s undeniably intriguing as a starting premise.
Sadly, instead of shedding light on events in this seminal series, I found a depressing nightmare worthy of Russian poetry. I wasn’t whisked away into the tunnels of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s beautiful apocalyptic nightmare. No, I was met with an abominable combination of the most underwhelming VR gameplay I’ve experienced in quite some time, combined with the small scope and the limited vision of a lesser spin-off title.
For those who haven’t played the mainline non-VR Metro games, they offer handcrafted worlds that pride themselves on attention to detail — they’re living, breathing worlds, with environments dotted by flourishes placed there simply because the developers thought they’d be cool. Very few assets are repeated in obvious ways, ensuring cohesive verisimilitude in aesthetics, remaining novel in every area.
The main titles also offer clever mechanical nuances like the bullet-based economy system that rewards stealth but grants brief moments of empowerment whenever the player is “rich” with bullets. The morality system is more complex than simply choosing to help an old lady across the street or kicking her into traffic, and there’s an inherent emphasis against violent force unless absolutely necessary. Worlds and systems like these possess the kind of depth that VR games are often still struggling to achieve. With a working blueprint to start from, Metro Awakening should’ve had most of this already solved.
Unfortunately, Metro Awakening has somehow failed to learn from the lessons laid out before it.
Here in VR, every combat encounter is unavoidable, and I’m often locked in claustrophobic spaces that offered, at best, an optional vent to flank enemies.
The levels can be so linear that I almost feel as though I’m on rails.
Combat itself is poorly implemented and enemy AI is absent, with foes often beelining straight towards me the second they were alerted.
Morality? Awakening has never heard of it.
Civilian areas are glorified loading screens between combat encounters.
Environmental assets are clearly copy-pasted, sometimes within minutes of each other.
Throughout Metro Awakening, the campaign kept trying to sell me mundane moments masquerading as intense thrills — things like random horror movie strings playing when there’s nothing to scare me besides another dead body after already seeing hundreds, or a room filled with two armed enemies — not a challenging hazard to get past. In another section, falling just a few feet (something Khan does regularly) causes enough ‘frightening’ damage to require use of a health item because someone scripted it so.
These banalities could possibly be forgiven if Khan’s means of surmounting obstacles were interesting, but they’re not. Too many puzzles grind down to flipping switches in a particular order after using his handcrank flashlight charger, and it takes over two hours before the player is offered anything other than a handgun and AK-47, and the later additions to their arsenal are far from exciting.
Meanwhile, the most reliable stealth option is punching enemies in the back of the head, which works most of the time, unless an enemy somehow becomes punch-proof and immediately starts shooting back with laser precision. Then I found I couldn’t move bodies, further undercutting the stealth. It’s as though years of genre refinements were either cut or went unaccounted for.
Not content to be mechanically disappointing, Awakening‘s script falls equally flat.
For a series known for its poetic, moving storytelling, this narrative is incredibly boring. In a post-Half-Life: Alyx world, how do developers repeat obvious mistakes like forcing players to listen to exposition while locked in a room with nothing to do for several minutes at a time while someone just talks? This is a mistake the mainline Metro games tried to avoid, often by having players travel to a location while talking.
Further, there are unskippable cutscenes where camera control is completely taken away from the player, sometimes going so far as to show the camera drifting out of Khan’s head, as if he’s having an out of body experience. It’s disorienting, to say the least, even for someone with a fair amount of VR experience like me, and anyone with a weak stomach should bear this in mind. There was also a recurring issue with subtitles oddly lagging and resetting my camera’s position, forcing me to shut them off entirely for smoother performance.
There’s simply no heart in Awakening. It’s a sad experience when looking back, and the biggest praise I have is that each gun makes it easy to check if ammo is already chambered, with the risk of popping out a spare round if not handled delicately.
If every element of Metro Awakening were on par with the reloading, it’d be one of the best VR games of the year. Instead, I struggle to imagine who this experience is for. I’m a longtime fan, and after spending time with it, all I have is a list of complaints about how the previous Metro style has been sanded down to nothing. I can only imagine new players being lost on its lore while finding gameplay that comes off like a blander version of every other shooter on the market. It’s not even a technical or graphical showcase. Instead, it feels like a product.
The Metro series is an incredible, harrowing journey with moving ruminations on the human condition. Metro Awakening is… not.
Final Score: 4 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Vertigo Games and published by Deep Silver. It is currently available on PC VR, Meta Quest and PSVR 2. This copy of Metro Awakening was provided via publisher and reviewed on Meta Quest 3. Approximately 5 hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is Rated M by the ESRB for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, and Use of Drugs and Alcohol. This one is not for the kids — both because of how likely they are to feel their stomachs turn, and because of the dark nature of the Metro universe. Graphic depictions of violence, lots of swearing, horrific monsters, and even a story beat involving human traffickers are all factors to consider. There’s also a substantial amount of leaning on arachnophobia in later sections.
Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. This could be a problem with the stealth meter displayed on Khan’s watch, which dims in color when he isn’t visible to enemies. There are also very bright splashes and flashes of red when taking damage, and some strobe light effects.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are multiple subtitle configuration options for several languages, including the optional feature to enable an indicator of which character is speaking. Barring the glitches mentioned above with the subtitles, it’s a reasonable experience to play without sound. However, since there are audio cues which do not have visual indicators, I have to say that it’s not fully accessible.
Remappable controls: This game offers partially remappable controls. Players can swap dominant hands and adjust certain movement options, like automating climbing ladders, instant teleport jumping/falling, and select from multiple types of turning. There is no ability to alter the turn rate speed, which is oddly high and may further jar players.
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