Review for Blood & Truth. Game for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, the video game was released on 28/05/2019
From the family we receive the ideas we live for and the disease we will die of, and in Blood & Truth we are witnesses at the forefront of this raison d'être. Proust describes it best one of the most inexorable realities in the life of many, if not all of us: it is the origin of our journey that most contributes to dictating its trajectory. The people we grow up around are capable of being the wind under our wings or the anchor that drags us to the bottom, it is up to us to decide whether to be lifted or sunk by it.
Blood & Truth is a PlayStation VR title that fully reflects this dualism: what it sets out to do and the contexts from which it is born give it strength and at the same time set the limits that partially bury it.
That at the heart of Blood & Truth isn't an incredibly original story: Ryan Marks he is immediately presented to us as a valid member of the SAS (Special Air Services) - one of the major special forces in England - who is recalled to his London home during a mission due to the death of his father. Upon returning home, we discover that Ryan and his entire family are important pieces of acriminal organization with wide influences, and now without a guide ... perfect time for the introduction of a villain, right? Exactly.
From this moment of loss a story unfolds that will see us do everything to protect our family from the collateral damage of one desperate and frantic search to maintain the status quo.
Unexpectedly, we return to the dualism we were talking about a little while ago, since it is first of all in the exposition of events and protagonists that Blood & Truth succeeds and, likewise, fails: like the narrative equivalent of a car whizzing in the wrong direction and at full speed on a highway, the wind in your face is beautiful and intoxicating, but the risk of leaving our skin is high and all too tangible.
Most of the characters suffer precisely because of the intrinsic wildness of the tale, leaving us a little bitter taste in the mouth in the awareness of the greater depth given to one secondary villain rather than the supporting actors who tread the scenes much more than her. The story therefore becomes nothing more than a pretext for us to enjoy the thousand-first shooting or the umpteenth slow-motion a la John Woo; appreciated, no doubt, but with the inevitable aftertaste of what could have been.
If it is the characterization of the characters that leaves something to be desired, surely the same cannot be said of graphic care with which they are made: more than once, in our play through, we were surprised by the maniacality with which the protagonists are made alive; the micro expressions and the millimeter movements of the body are splendid manifestations of atruly remarkable attention to detail, capable of fulfilling the implicit promises of this generation of virtual reality on consoles.
Unfortunately, a more in-depth look at Blood & Truth forces us to ask ourselves why the care expressed in the staging of the protagonists was not reserved even partially to the "minions" that we will face: stage after stage, the bad guys who decide to get in our way are generic and they belong to one of a handful of "models"; in some sections you will even find yourself shooting consecutively at 10-15 consecutive copies of the same enemy. The environments that are the background to the eternal shootings do not raise the bar much; even if built on a good level design, they are victims of the lack of graphic variety, limitations that diminish Blood & Truth even more to the level of a common “corridor shooter“.
We can only imagine the difficulties in creating such a dynamic title for one platform still "growing", but we legitimately ask ourselves if it really couldn't be done better.
It should come as a surprise that in an FPS the honorable mention has to go and go to one of the very few stages where you don't fire a single bullet, set within a museum with strong avant-garde influences. It is in contexts and concepts like these that it becomes impossible not to recognize the non-strictly videogame potential of peripherals such as PS VR: a dark room that lights up following our movements; the disturbing darkness of the semi-voluntary social isolation that physically and metaphorically envelops us, interrupted only by the light of a telephone or the sound of an unconnected call; a musical composition created only by the vertical movement of long-limbed luminous structures.
Blood & Truth is undoubtedly a title based on fun, but this is the section that most strips of its essence and evolves into a virtual playground.
The most successful aspect in many respects is the feel of the weapons and the intoxicating fun that comes from the endless shootings: to draw the weapon all you have to do is bring the PS Move to your side and press the trigger, ditto for sheathing it. You will soon become familiar with the different rate of fire, magazine size and general reliability of the various primary weapons, and it is only when you might vaguely start to get bored that heavy weapons are introduced, to be drawn strictly in the manner as cinematic as possible or by pressing the Trigger with the Move positioned upside down along our back.
The accuracy of the weapons always finds the point of perfect compromise between replication of reality and videogame fiction, collecting the best of the virtus of both worlds: an unsuccessful shot you will always perceive as an actual error on your part, never an unexpected consequence of the set difficulty or a malicious bug. The design of the weapons is well cared for, from pistols to sawed-off shotguns to grenade launchers: some weapons can be used in combo, while almost all heavy ones have a sort of "secondary mode" that can be activated simply by using them with two hands.
Blood & Truth takes us to the center of the action with two main modes, at least as regards the shootings: we will in fact find ourselves either in cover behind the fortuitous column or slowly moving forward as if we were on an roller coaster; the latter are the scenes in which the title works best, wearing the guise of an updated pseudo-revision of the immortal Time Crisis or one of those rail-shooters that help fill the spectrum from unmissable (Rez Infinite) to forgettable ( Until Dawn: Rush of Blood).
The slow-motion moments are well spaced and it's really fun to use the precision mode (a sort of one-off slowdown) to take down the most massive enemies by hitting them in several consecutive critical points; on the other hand the (fortunately) few sections of "platforming" oscillate between the useless and the frustrating. Did you feel like coming back to Time Crisis too, now?
But Blood & Truth isn't just about bullets and explosions, but he has the appreciable courage to try to add something to the mix: there are in fact several situations in which you will find yourself having to bypass an electrical circuit, redirect the current to open a door or eliminate an alarm, or even just force a lock; these pleasant diversions are the right crunchiness necessary to enhance the action salad that the title represents, so much so that we can imagine its application on more canonical and mainstream franchises like Fallout or Elder Scrolls.
The very simple gesture of two-handed rotation that picking a lock requires, returns a pleasant breath of freshness precisely at the level of intrinsic mechanics, making it as fun as a shooting at the last bullet, if not more.
The sound is certainly the side that, inevitably, offers less noteworthy ideas while performing its task in a discreet way: the gunshots are well made, so much so that you can distinguish the instrument with your eyes closed. death in one's possession; if you pay the right attention to sound patterns you can even anticipate the need to load by relying only on the finesse of the noise of the loader that gradually empties.
The soundtrack that accompanies the vicissitudes of Ryan Marks has its roots in London grime scene, with its hyper-palpable rap / ragga influences and lyrics almost entirely dedicated to the grim realities of urban life in the outskirts of the City.
In the English language there is a very interesting saying, difficult to contextualize but which literally says "too many cooks spoil the broth", And Blood & Truth seems to suffer from a comparable (but more limited) misfortune: it seems more than anything else we wanted to do too much and everything at the same time, giving the genre a title again. angular and slightly unripe to the aftertaste.
There are several positive aspects and on careful analysis they seem to be approximately more valid than the counterweight offered by the most obvious defects: for each paraverbal nuance in the polygonal model of one of the protagonists there is yet another copy-paste henchman; for every adrenaline-pumping moment there is a slower-to-go lift than in the first Mass Effect; for every breakneck shooting, a dialogue without depth. It seems more the difference between the claims of the title and their actual success, the real worry of the London Studio production: certainly the budget has been exploited properly, perhaps not to the best of the potential of the VR platform, but still managing to create a product much more memorable for what it succeeds than objectionable for what it fails.
In short, the London Studios FPS is definitely another important step of the path started with the PSVR Experience “The Heist” some time ago.
In hand, at the end of the game, all that remains is the hope that Playstation VR will continue to shine like a star, also thanks to titles like Blood & Truth, and that it will lead us verse after verse along this extraordinary poem called virtual reality. Because in a world so dark and full of terror, perhaps it is the only way to return to that sense of innocent disbelief of when we were children: it allows us to go back to seeing a world in a grain of sand and a universe in a flower. field, reminds us that we can enclose eternity in an hour and have infinity in the palm of our hand.
► Blood & Truth is an FPS type game developed by SCE London Studio and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, the video game was released on 28/05/2019
