Blood & Truth is like shooting your way through an old Guy Ritchie movie—but with cooler museums
Every Friday, several A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
When Sony launched the PSVR back in 2016, it was with a certain, let’s say, dearth of killer app titles for early adopters to enjoy. Out of all the “games” available at or around the peripheral’s launch, the most robust was really just a glorified tech demo: SIE London Studio’s PlayStation VR Worlds, which included a couple of short but captivating experiences for owners to (briefly) wow their friends with. The most notable of these was one called “London Heist,” which allowed players to make their way through a very truncated, gunplay-heavy take on a Guy Ritchie movie. (Early Guy Ritchie; not Aladdin.) The idea was to say: “Hey, here’s the sort of things we could do with this hardware, given enough time.” Enough time has now, happily, arrived.
And Jesus, but it’s galling to imagine how much less qualified a PSVR recommendation would have been back then, if something like the studio’s new offering, Blood & Truth, had been available on Day One. Robust, technically polished, and—in a medium where full-priced, prestige games can clock out at an hour or two—long, it’s a remarkably assured title, even if it doesn’t have much more to say than, “Isn’t it fun to shoot bad guys while British people yell?”
To be fair, the pleasantly solid gunplay—which flows with minimal complication through the PS Move controllers, natch—isn’t the only thing Blood & Truth has to offer; there are also a few bravura sequences that are pretty clearly London Studio saying “Hey, let’s show off a bit.” The extended monkey bar segments—ideal for giving your friends blackmail material as they take video of you moving hand-over-hand in your own living room—we could take or leave. But a mid-game sequence where you put the guns down and make your way through a modern art museum at night is legitimately one of the coolest things we’ve seen anybody do with this tech, to the point where we almost wish this was a full-fledged museum walking simulator, rather than a gritty, intrigue-heavy crime game.
If you already have a PSVR, Blood & Truth feels pretty much inevitable; sure, there are the occasional technical defects, and the writing is no more than serviceable. But what are you going to do, not play a five-to-six hour first-party adventure with this much reliable gun-running gameplay? (Or rather, gun-teleporting-from-spot-to-spot.) Still, though: It’s sad to think about the time when this would have been a slam-dunk, must-buy killer app for this system, a time that’s now fully two years past the critical point.