Blood & Truth review for PlayStation VR

While we?ve seen our fair share of ?shooting gallery? VR games at this point, Blood & Truth from London Studio is something else entirely. Styled around a fully fleshed out, unique story that builds upon The London Heist from VR Worlds, you?ll likely not find another experience like this one on the PlayStation VR. With intuitive motion controls, remarkably precise weapon handling, and a host of interactive features, this is easily one of the best action VR games on the market today.

The story kicks off with the main character being brought home after the sudden death of his father, only to find the family business in danger of a literal hostile takeover from a rival organization. Teaming up with your family and other members of your organization, you?ll fight off countless foes across 19 different stages set against the backdrop of London. The locales here are all pretty unique, ranging from glitzy casino floor to a derelict building scheduled for demolition. Each location, in addition to finding plenty of reasons for multiple challenging shootouts, has other interactive features, allowing you to climb, crawl, pick locks, hack keypads, and more. All of which controls quite well with two Move controllers, but also completely viable via a standard DualShock.

The main draw here is going to be the gunplay and how everything controls and feels when in the middle of a firefight. At the onset of the game, while setting up calibration, you?ll have two primary functions, ammo and weapons. Your character has two hip holsters, ammo stored on the chest, and two additional slots on your back for larger weapons like assault rifles or submachine guns. In order to draw your weapon, simply move your hand with the Move controller to your desired spot and pull in the trigger to essentially magnetize the gun to your hand. When you need to reload, use your opposite hand and move it to your chest, pull the trigger, and then move the ammo towards the gun you need to load. You can do this even while dual wielding pistols, or if you want to be fancy, can try tossing ammo in the air and catching it with your gun. Blood & Truth also utilizes the rumble function in the Move controllers to help you know when you?ve got your hand positioned correctly for drawing weapons, especially useful when reaching for the guns stored on your back.

You can opt to hold weapons with one or two hands. Two hands giving the effect of added stability, more useful for automatic weapons that have a higher recoil effect. You can aim down sights and even gain access to improved mods for guns, like reflex sights instead of iron sights, and the action of looking down sights feels remarkably natural here. You can also dual wield certain weapons, namely pistols and submachine guns. Other weapons, like shotguns, may have additional mechanics such as the need to pump the shotgun after every round fired. All in all, weapon handling feels amazing, and works really well throughout. There were very few instances where I felt like the motion controls were getting jumbled or lost by the camera, and often enough a quick re-calibration was all it took to get things back in working order.

Most stages will also contain a number of collectibles, some of which are pretty well hidden. There are also optional targets to seek out, and stars to collect. You can revisit completed stages from the main menu, which will also give you an indicator of how many items you?ve missed, and what your overall score for that level is. Other features are planned here, including a time attack mode and online leaderboards, which will add some additional replay value down the road. The main campaign is lengthy enough without wearing out its welcome, and the ratio of action pieces to story moments is fairly even. The voice acting work here is really well done, featuring a few recognizable faces, and overall Blood & Truth looks really nice in VR, even with the reduced resolution that comes with most PSVR titles.

I would absolutely suggest checking out Blood & Truth if you?re a PSVR owner, it?s certainly one of the most fleshed out action experiences available on the platform, and features some of the best weapon handling mechanics I?ve seen in VR altogether. It has a fun, action packed campaign mode along with just enough additional features and reasons to revisit completed stages. Definitely one of the best games available on PSVR, and certainly not one you should miss.

Note: SCEA provided us with a Blood & Truth PSVR code for review purposes.