Look at this! Wave your hands’ So says Nick Marks to his brother, Ryan, whom we perform as in Blood & Truth. The pair are creeping through an art gallery during the nighttime when they cease to play with an interactive light show on the ceiling. It is an odd moment, about a third of the way through the game, and that, crammed as it is with explosions and gunfire, isn’t short of interactive light displays. What it does reveal is developer SIE London Studio’s understanding of VR — that its magic, predictably, lies not at the bassy crump of a set piece but at the small moments of just becoming . ‘That’s good, though, you’ve got to admit,’ he says, until Ryan agrees,’Yeah, that is… that’s fairly impressive.’
Blood & Truth is all about a gang war, rival families, the intelligence services, and something resembling the Illuminati. All of that may be resolved with abundant shooting, something Ryan is happy to supply — and something we have to wrangle with a little. Perform is an odd mix: first-person shooting and light gun action, with a couple of puzzly odds and ends — snipping wires with pliers — all of wrapped together and served up involving cutscenes that are you leaning into scrutinize the freckles on characters’ faces. Believe Time Crisis, just you are able to select where the railings require you, an adventure similar to scooting about in an office chair while swivelling your head. What is more, you’ve got hands, which function not only as useful grabbers, for clambering across rails and squirming through vents, but also for giving the finger to people attempting to progress the storyline.
It is allegedly set in London, however I am not convinced. We waft through warehouses and trendy lofts, into art galleries and alleyways of brick and blinking neon. Everything has the unclogged cleanliness of a car advert. The city is described, on the game’s web page, as being possessed of glamour and grit, but I say leave the glamour and the grit and revolve around the greys: concrete, clouds, steel, sky. Such are the colors of London, and occasionally I’d turn into peek at something familiar — a workaday backstreet, a man on his phone at a pelican crossing — to get some real feel. How odd that London Studio (formerly Team Soho) should falter in crafting a true capital, particularly given its history with The Getaway (where some old textures have been plucked.
Those short minutes made me all the more miserable for want of a Getaway game, a series near my heart; it seems as though the talented souls at London Studio ought to be released from Sony’s chic interiors — away from the likes of SingStar and DanceStar Party — also sent out into the road. How else do you get vibrant British flavour to the match? 1 thing you don’t do is get Colin Salmon, the veteran British actor with a voice like velvet (and who is spent a large portion of his career swimming upstream), to put on an American accent and thus sandbag his considerable suavity. It certainly put a dampener on my efforts — during the segments where he’s on your ear, guiding you to pretend I was at a Bond game, which it was Salmon’s character from Tomorrow Never Dies, Charles Robinson, providing vital support. (Thankfully, it is a dream supported by the flashy, Brosnan-era soundtrack.)
The story is framed by an interrogation, giving us considerable chance to jump about involving missions — cue a summery jeep chase which puts the crackle of gunfire to It Just Won’t Do, by Tim Deluxe, and another section that sees you haring through a construction site because it crumbles around you. These blockbuster set bits — mouldy by blockbuster action standards — are heightened and tuned up in VR. Obtaining up your gunsight is a thrill, similarly peeking around corners and popping shots from cover off. You understand that what London Studio has done — and perhaps what VR should do — isn’t to reinvent or revolutionise, to provide showy’adventures,’ but to tease joys that are refreshing out from what we have.
Its finer particulars — plot, character, circumstance — vanish just like gunsmoke, and its own tiny touches loom large in my head. It is no wonder my recommendation of Blood & Truth springs out of my closing admiration of nothing much: the knurled grip of a gun, turning in my couch to check the road rolling away behind the car, holding a vape up to my mouth so that Ryan can take a drag. All these tiny moments that replicate little bits of real life seem a lot more immediate and attractive than draining a hangar filled with heavies having an assault rifle out. It’s the truth, not the blood vessels, that gets me in the end.
