Metro Awakening brings the post-apocalyptic tunnel-dwelling franchise to VR for the first time, but is it a good fit? Read on to find out in our full review.

Metro Awakening Details:

Publisher: Vertigo Games
Available On: Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: November 7th, 2024
Price: $50

Editor’s note: all clips in this review are from the Quest 3 version of the game. Screenshots are from the PC VR version.

Gameplay

Developer Vertigo Games did a fine job of making Metro Awakening feel like a Metro game, but in VR. Although not nearly as broad in scope as the most recent title in the franchise, Metro Exodus (2019), it captures many of the series’ staples: a gritty, post-apocalyptic setting, interesting improvised weaponry, and a gameplay loop based around the pillars of scavenging, sneaking, and shooting.

The game’s weapons and shooting mechanics are its strengths. You start with a fairly basic pistol and AK-47. I particularly like that enemies stagger visibly when taking shots, making the impact of shooting feel much better than the more often seen bullet-sponge enemies. You’re pretty vulnerable yourself, and will find that squeezing off a few AK rounds into a bad guy and then taking cover is more effective than just standing out in the open. Gun fights feel scrappy rather than bombastic.

Later in the game you find a crossbow and a shotgun. While these weapon archetypes have been seen a hundred times before in VR, these two feel right at home among the uniquely cool makeshift weaponry the Metro series is known for.

The crossbow is a revolver with a pop-out cylinder into which you slide sharp metal rods. Cocking the crossbow requires pulling back a huge lever on top. Because of the weapon’s barebones construction, can watch exactly how the mechanism articulates to lift one of the bolts into position. And dang, it’s sure cool to see.

Like any good crossbow, this thing is quiet. And there’s an absolute satisfaction with not only dropping someone silently from the shadows, but then pulling the bolt from your victim, popping out the crossbow’s revolver-style cylinder, and sliding it right back in for the next shot. Retrievable ammo weapons in games always have that extra layer of fun, but there’s something especially unique about doing this in VR when it’s your own hands removing and reloading the bolts.

The next weapon, the shotgun, is for when you’re ready to go loud. Surprisingly, this one isn’t pump action, but it has a unique design all its own that makes it a standout. And you may know that I have a pretty high bar for what constitutes a great feeling shotgun in VR.

Image courtesy Vertigo Games

The shotgun in Metro Awakening is actually a revolver like the crossbow. But, interestingly, it has an exposed cylinder, which means you can pop shells into any open slot before pulling the charging handle to load a round. Again, the skeletal, makeshift construction of the weapon means you can really see how it operates, which is just extra cool in VR because you can inspect and articulate your gun however you want (rather than being stuck looking at canned animations).

The game’s final weapon is the blowdart gun, and while I love the idea of physically raising it to your mouth to fire, it doesn’t feel like it fits well with the rest of the game’s weapons. Not only does it feel like an inferior version of the crossbow, it’s just less fun and less satisfying to use.

All things considered, the game’s weapons have a great feel—especially the crossbow and shotgun—even if there are only four primary weapons to be found overall.

Scavenging also feels good. The detailed environments generally give me enough to look at to enjoy peeking around corners and down hallways to see if I can spot some extra supplies.

Scavenging goes hand-in-hand with being prepared, which is a must in Metro Awakening. If you jump into a fight without making sure your mags are loaded, knowing which weapons are equipped, and being able to operate your weapons confidently under pressure, you’ll get overwhelmed and overrun quickly.

I enjoyed the feeling of the scavenging and emphasis on preparedness. I found myself regularly picking magazines off of dispatched weapons to steal the ammo, making sure my health syringe was prepared, and pre-selecting my shoulder-slung weapon depending upon which enemies I expected to encounter.

Rather than just finding extra supplies, some kind of ‘currency’ (ie: ‘weapon parts’) that could be applied to upgrade your weapons would have made for a more exciting scavenging reward, and would have fit well into Metro gameplay tropes.

Though there were ample opportunities to fight stealthily instead of going in guns-ablazin’, I didn’t find the stealth opportunities particularly exciting. Knocking people out with a punch to the head doesn’t feel very satisfying, and it seemed to backfire in many cases, with the bad guy just being confused for a moment before blasting.

Enemy AI was good at least, which keeps combat interesting. The enemies frequently communicate and move around the environment, giving them a sense of intelligence. Some enemies, like the rat mutants, can be a bit annoying because they sometimes come up behind you with little time to react to their presence.

But I do appreciate their behaviors like running away after taking some initial damage and peering around corners before popping out for a bite.

The game has a literal arachnophobia warning at the start, and for good reason. There are several sequences with spider enemies, including times where spiders are literally crawling on your head. I appreciate the creepiness of these moments, but found the actual combat with these enemies more annoying than not. Spiders can leap onto your face or hand, and it isn’t exactly clear what the player is supposed to do about it. I imagine a lot of people will end up smacking their headset once or twice while trying to pull the spider off.

Another annoying enemy were the game’s frequent ‘shadow’ figures which made for some boring and poorly telegraphed gameplay. The figures, which blend quite well into the game’s dark tunnels, will kill you if you stand near them for a few seconds. But given they’re hard to see, and that taking damage from them makes your screen even darker, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re even being hurt by them. Oh and there’s friendly shadows that look almost the same, but don’t do damage to you….

Even after beating the game, I’m still kind of unsure exactly what was intended with this ‘shadow figure’ gameplay. Waiting for an NPC to move out of the way so you can get to where you’re going just isn’t fun. Maybe there was some way to dispel them? Shooting certainly didn’t do the trick.

While Metro Awakening has strong VR fundamentals and a compelling first half, the latter half of the game unfortunately lacks the variety for a strong finish. From a story that’s nebulous and difficult to care about, to repeating gameplay sequences that aren’t particularly fun on your fourth or fifth go, to just a lot of needless walking, it felt like a great first half of the game gave way to a padded and uninspired second half.

It took me 7.5 hours to finish the game on medium difficulty, but I would have been happy if they had cut out some of the repetitive gameplay segments for a tighter and overall more fun experience.

Immersion

Metro Awakening isn’t high up there in environmental interactivity, but it does have a great sense of atmosphere. Environments are detailed, decrepit, and feel authentic in the way that much of the world looks like it’s been cobbled together from the remnants of a fallen society.

Although the game looks significantly better in its PC and PSVR 2 version (thanks to better textures, models, and much better lighting), I was generally impressed with the visual presentation on Quest 3. Although not as well lit or textured, environments felt equally dense on Quest 3, without any obvious cases of assets being carelessly crushed to meet the performance budget. The game relies heavily on Meta’s Application Spacewarp tech to run as well as it does on the standalone headset—bringing with it some artifacts—but generally I think it’s a good trade for how the game looks on Quest 3. I haven’t had a chance to test Metro Awakening on Quest 2 yet, so the verdict is still out on that.

For better or for worse, the inherent claustrophobia of being stuck in an abandoned metro really lands in a VR headset. Walking through the game’s labyrinthine tunnels and hallways makes you feel like there’s nowhere to run and that every corner could be hiding a threat. Consistently good ambient sound design helps to sell the game’s well measured tension. Though I didn’t appreciate how the game’s music would frequently kick in and spoil an upcoming encounter that would have otherwise been surprising.

I personally enjoyed getting immersed in this tense atmosphere, but some might find it oppressive.

Although the game’s holster system generally works quite well, the complete lack of a body or any indicators as to the location of the inventory volumes are felt like a miss for a VR game of this scope in 2024. All you see is floating hands… it’s up to you to remember where all the invisible inventory locations are. In the midst of combat, for instance, if you can’t remember exactly how to pull out your weapon backpack (reach over your left shoulder with your right hand), you’re going to be scrambling.

Although the affordances for the inventory system aren’t great, I did appreciate the usability. I haven’t seen a VR game use the gesture of ‘reach with your right hand over the opposite shoulder’ before, but it seemed like the game did a great job of detecting this consistently with few false positives.

I also liked the diegetic inventory design. Basically you have two backpacks: one for guns and one for other equipment like grenades, gas mask, and health vials. In both cases, items are generally represented on your backpacks at full size and their actual count, rather than shrinking unrealistically and ‘stacking’ into infinite piles. So if you have three grenades, you’ll see three full-sized grenades on your backpack. And you can’t fit any more, because there’s only enough room for three.

This makes for an immersive way to not only communicate to the player how many supplies they have, but also an immersive way for players to actually retrieve the items. I also like that the game will give the player key items contextually from the chest inventory slot. If you’re holding a pistol and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a pistol magazine. If you’re holding the health syringe and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a fresh health vial. It feels very natural in practice and minimizes the cognitive load of frequent actions like reloading—a smart design that also worked great in Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

As a general framework for VR game inventory, this one has legs.

While the game’s atmosphere is compelling, I did find myself wishing there was more environmental interactivity. This is one of those games where some objects are interactive and some just… aren’t, with little rhyme or reason between what you can pick up and what you can’t. Even if there wasn’t any extra gameplay associated with making more of the world’s objects interactive, there’s so much detail visually in the world that it would add to the immersion to know that I could actually grab and look at all the things scattered about.

Comfort

Metro Awakening offers a full set of modern VR comfort options, including teleport movement. However, its particular choice of setting—cramped environments and quite a few steep stairs—is going to be less comfortable to those sensitive to motion discomfort than an equivalent game with more open environments and less frequent stair motion.

There are several moments in the game where the horizon is shifted significantly. For most, these are brief enough to not be problematic, but such moments can be triggering for certain people (and generally speaking, they could have been executed without altering the horizon).

Metro Awakening’ Comfort Settings – November 7th, 2024

Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin America), Czech, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian
Dialogue audio
Languages English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height
REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
7.5
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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Andrey

    Just want to make a, imo, very interesting point regarding this game and it's developers attention to lore and details.
    On Steam, under one of the negative reviews where person criticized that there is no weapon customization in the game (that always was a part of the franchise starting from original Metro 2033 that released back in 2010), there was a developer's response. It was something about main character of the Awakening game "being a doctor and not a soldier", so "he just grabs and uses what he can to survive", thus "he can't upgrade weapons".
    Well, the problem is that Artyom – the main character of the original series – was never a soldier himself. Hell, he was a child when the nuclear war started, so he was never properly trained "on the surface" and generally started as a newbie regarding survival in the first game. Moreover, all the upgrades in the first game(s) (as far as I remember) were performed by technicians in towns in exchange for ammo and only in Exodus Artyom was performing it himself on the workbenches (when he already was an experienced man and there just weren't any towns around), so…
    Not trying to *&^% on the developers too much at the moment, especially because I haven't played the game myself (waiting for this patch for arachnophobic people), but I think it's a pretty dull decision to remove one of the coolest things of Metro series, especially when there are not so many of weapon types in general – even in comparison with the original games – and with such hollow reasoning too. Not cool Vertigo games, not cool…

    • ViRGiN

      lol

      • ViRGiN

        "Steam" and "negative reviews" brought me here, so I'm at full mast with my full 3.75 inches standing to attention!

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Ugh, I hate things like weapons customization, just give me a weapon and be fine with it.

      • KRAKEN

        It makes games more fun. i also hated it, but now its fun, instead of 4-6 weapons per game you get 20-30
        What i hate about customization is when they fake it, like when you always have an obvious choise, for example, silencer that increases your critical by some % or silence that doesn't get penalty in damage

        • Andrew Jakobs

          But I never liked things like that, I just wanna play and not spend hours customizing things, that's also why I don't really like a lot of RPG's where you have to customize your character to death, I just wanna run around do quests and see every corner of the map/scenery.

          • KRAKEN

            Strange, because when i play RPG and if I manage to get highest gear before i finish the game i lose interest, its like “why should i keep playing if i already have the best gear in the game?”
            I couldn’t play a game where im using same gear.

            BTW in metro you dont have to customize it, it drops from people already moded, so if you like something you can keep it
            And it has very reasonable customization, like silencer, holders etc

          • Andrew Jakobs

            And that's why there are so many different games, people have different tastes.

          • kool

            Exactly I think upgrades should be quest based you beat a boss get his weapon or gear, complete a challenge get a better cloak or whatever. I hate random loot and percentage based equipment upgrades it just gives idiots a chance to cheese games with youtube ultimate build meta BS I don't have time to think about ugh. One game that got it right was tom Clancy wildlands. You'd kill a boss and get his highly customized gun, you take a military base and find 50 cals and launchers, you raid a drug spot and find customized pistols and SMGs. You do something cool you get a cool weapon how hard difficult is that concept?

    • pixxelpusher

      I think playing it based on the previous flat games is the wrong approach. The devs have said in a AMA that they were going for something a bit different for VR, something more of a story based first person adventure game than just a shooter, as that's the great immersive part of VR and its huge strength, that it can sit somewhere between being in a game and a movie type experience. They're basically bringing the world of the books to life, more than just trying to be a carbon copy of the flat games. Which I personally find interesting as we don't really have many rich and mature VR narrative experiences. Having to micro manage everything would just get in the way, which is why I also enjoyed the gun mechanic in Arizona Sunshine, they never got in the way of the experience of the adventure.

      • Andrey

        Um, you do understand that they actually brought 90% of gameplay mechanics presented in “flat” Metro games from 4A Games? So… if they were going for “something bit different for VR”, why they didn’t change other things as well?
        Like the other commenter mentioned that they don’t like weapon customization: it’s totally fine to not like such game mechanic, but the problem is that this game has stealth – just like “flat” original – but you can’t even do something as simple (yet effective) as putting a silencer on your pistol/rifle for, you know, a “stealthy” approach, and you are only limited to using your hands or crossbow. Don’t you think that there is no consistence in making such decisions?

    • MeowMix

      I played Metro 2033 and 2034 way back in the day, and completely forgot it had weapon customization. Point being, it didn't leave a big impression on the gameplay; don't really care it's there or not.

      • Ben Lang

        Giving a greater / more interesting reward for scavenging is the point. Just getting more ammo or health is "meh" after a while.

        • kool

          I don't think vertigo has the resources for gun mods, but that's still no excuse. They could have had a few customized versions of each gun some of the big bands tote around.

    • KRAKEN

      You are wrong.
      Metro games based on books.
      Arthyom worked like all men in station security, patrols, etc.
      In the first book [plus/minus equal to first game] he also got enough experience to be a gun pro

    • kool

      They could have just said it's not realistic to customize guns on the fly. You may be able to swap out for a larger magazine you find but you can't even swap a sight out on a gun without taking the time to zero it out with either a boring round or a practice range. And don't forget the scope has to be compatible with the railing system too with no manufacturer making new parts for standard wear and tear and gun maintenance being a thing of the past with dirt, water and rust being rampant…you'd lose a thumb or eye trying to hot swap gun parts. Even picking guns up off a body outside is risky, chances are the barrel ate a little dirt as the body dropped. Id keep rambling like this until you lose interest in the subject. But it is a cool game mechanic that should have been in the game. I don't think vertigo has ever done customization in any before tho.

  • kakek

    "I haven’t had a chance to test Metro Awakening on Quest 2 yet, so the verdict is still out on that."

    Thanks for thinking about us Q2 owners. Hope you will update the review when you've tested ut.

    • Storymode Chronicles

      It's got crossbuy between PCVR and Quest 2, so you only need to buy it once to play on both platforms, as long as you buy from Meta.

    • NL_VR

      I know a guy who play the game on Quest 2 and be thinks its good and work well.
      worth to mention Quest 2 native is the only VR experience he has so he cant compare

      • kakek

        I tried it. It's barely enjoyable. Quest game tuner can make things a bit better, but not much.

  • XRC

    Purchased this as soon as I got notification from Steam it released. Look forward to trying soon, thoroughly enjoy the Metro games in the past.

  • senix 01

    half life alxy benziyor mu bu

  • Patrick Dorsman

    I started the PC version and ran into various visual bugs right away. I might have to refund the game if they don’t patch it. Performance is also disappointing considering the graphics and the fact that I’m using a 4090. This game wasn’t ready for release on PC.

    • kakek

      I started it on a 3060ti.
      Very few glitches. I had a couple of lights emit brights flash in the begining. That's it.
      Performance is … meh.
      Run in high, 90 FPS. Looks OK-ish. Definitively lacks physics on most objects, wich would have made rumaging around so much better. Like, once again, HL:Alyx. Where you would naturally push the stuff in your way on the shelf, grab a box and tilt it over to see if there's nothing inside. Awesome for immersion.
      Also lacks dynamics shadows. There's only a handfull, and not on most enemys.

      All around, still enjoyable and atmospherique, but nowhere near what PCVR was 10 years ago. Guess we still have to wait a couple more years to see if quest 4 does better.

  • david vincent

    Devs have been a bit lazy with this PCVR port, they could at least have upscaled the textures through AI

  • KRAKEN

    Looks like an excellent game, another reason to own VR, maybe the only 2024 game worth playing, not maybe, PROBABLY the only 2024 game worth playing!