Blood & Truth is a savvy and seasoned virtual reality thriller confident in its suave posture and meticulous operation. It is simultaneously a bonkers riff on outrageous action cinema where it's just as easy to imagine its main character as narrowly sentient tank treads with gun-hands born to decimate cloned hordes of bungling bald men. Blood & Truth works even as its internal truth is a grinning mystery.
There is a moment in Blood & Truth where the player gets to be a club DJ and a bloodthirsty crack shot at the exact same time. Hunkered behind a turntable in a shootout, one hand can fire a pistol into the brains of irate henchmen while the other, if you’d like, can scratch a nearby record and perfect the beat. This lasts about a minute but the absurd duality speaks for the entirety of Blood & Truth. As second generation virtual reality software from London Studio, it’s skilled at eliminating discomfort and disorientation from a capricious medium. As an empowering action fantasy, it’s often hysterical. Blood & Truth often captures both perspectives at the same time.
On its surface, Blood & Truth presents as a buttoned-up and thoroughly British crime-caper. The Guy Ritchie hustle that powered The Getaway and PlayStation VR Worlds’ London Heist segment continues to thrash around in London Studio’s wheelhouse. Characters talk fast, cheerfully riposte insults, and execute the same level of professional violence as the cast of Snatch and RocknRolla. Why Blood & Truth’s plot pushes forward isn’t necessarily important. All that matters is what the player is doing in the moment.
Blood & Truth only lives in the present. It opens with the player character, with Felix Scott as Ryan Marks, wrapping up a military operation somewhere in the Middle East. From there he’s returned to London and picked up at the airport by his brother, Jay Taylor as Nick Marks, to sort through the estate of his deceased father. The remainder of Blood & Truth’s narrative is a hastened enigma. I think the Marks family is in charge of some kind of prestigious British crime syndicate and I know Ryan is really good at climbing things, murdering people, and making an extraordinary mess inside of every available environment. Everyone else, including Ryan’s family and his well-dressed rival bad guy Tony Sharp, exists to facilitate Ryan’s needs to kill and climb.
Like any sustainable crime caper, most of Blood & Truth is framed in medias res through an interrogation and flashback. Colin Salmon employs an American accent and embodies a battle-tested operative, Carson, as he sorts through Ryan’s recent past. With Carson meeting the player’s eyes, an appropriately filthy table, and a classic headshot corkboard, Blood & Truth sells its quiet moments with shrewd environmental authenticity. Areas feels detailed, expensive, and aware players are trying to find its seams. A valid sense of place is always under Blood & Truth’s consideration.
Half of Blood & Truth is spent trying to outdo Schwarzenegger’s third act rampage in Commando. Shooting galleries are a dime-a-dozen in virtual reality and make it hard for a new game to say anything new. Through its smart and simplified gunplay and refined means of accessing weapons, Blood & Truth makes the process intuitive and easy. Pistols are holstered on each side of the player’s hips while larger gun like shotguns and assault rifles are zoned on the player’s back. Guiding the Move controller to your hips or over your head “reaches” the guns, an action signaled by the vibration of the controller. Similarly, bringing a hand to you upper chest grabs clips while moving those clips over to a gun reloads ammunition.
This process seems like a lot to ask from Sony’s finicky Move controllers. In the past the Move’s lack of precision, not the mention the tracking disaster when both controllers intersect on the same plane, clearly limited PlayStation VR’s capability. The kind of magic London Studio sold their souls to perform isn’t especially clear, but gunplay works great in Blood & Truth’s moment-to-moment operation. After a brief period of adjustment I was dropping clips, reloading, and switching guns with lightning-fast precision. Grenades were opaque, I never figured out if I could attach them to my belt or something, but those always felt more like arcade-like bonuses instead of useful progression tools.
Basic movement is another Virtual Reality Obstacle Blood & Truth quickly overcomes. Ryan’s locomotion is fixed to point-to-point movement, but not in the aim-and-shoot teleportation favored by other VR games. Instead, predetermined points exist on the field and the player can select when to move to those points. Forward progress is typically inhibited by henchman, meaning you can move around, but you can’t advance the game, until no one is left standing. This—and the omnipresent disembodied pair of hands—can make Ryan feel more like a Terminator’s ghost than a person. Considering Ryan’s insatiable bloodlust and ruthless efficiency, Blood & Truth feels ready to wear whatever shoe fits.
When virtual reality shooters lose sight of player agency they can turn out a product that is closer to Hogan’s Alley or Lethal Enforcers than a medium-defining adventure. By automating movement and surrounding the player with context-sensitive options and visually spectacular responses, Blood & Truth feels like a lost sequel to Sega AM2’s Virtua Cop. There’s an arcade sensibility to progression that isn’t inhibited by a lack of feedback. I never ran out of ammunition, never lost sight of who I was supposed to shoot, and never got bored with my assigned mission.
Like Virtua Cop’s shrinking neon crosshairs, Blood & Truth is also quick to provide audio and visual rewards for proficient play. A bullet-time mechanic can be engaged to deal with heavily armored enemies or vehicles. Time slows, a glowing blue crosshair focuses on weak points, and zing-ping sound effect is issued every time the player strikes a target. Vehicles explode or men die after three or four direct hits, eliminating an imminent threat and providing the player with a giddying sense of satisfaction. Killing people for five straight hours in virtual reality may be an indictment of our present social decay, but gosh Blood & Truth makes it a blast to do.
The other half of Blood & Truth is left to various measures of exposition and exploration. Climbing objects is an extension of Blood & Truth London Studio seemed particularly pleased with executing. The player will use both hands to ascend pipes to reach different floors, pull their body forward in ventilation shafts, and swing across monkey bars to get across gaps. This works surprisingly well (as long as you don’t let go!) and I like the idea of hanging loose while firing a machine gun, but there’s a weird amount of climbing in Blood & Truth.
An early objective in Blood & Truth is blissfully free of any gunplay. Together with Nick, you infiltrate a museum owned by the villainous Tony with the explicit purpose of destroying everything inside of it. The motivating belief appears to be simply pissing Tony off. You knock over an abstract art installation and watch it all collapse. You play with shadows and mannequins in the dark. You fire a paint gun at self-indulgent paintings. It’s Blood & Truth’s interpretation of the mythic house demolition in Vice Principals.
On paper the museum is a succession of Neat Virtual Reality Activities London Studio came up with to help Blood & Truth define objectives other than murder. In practice and premise it’s completely insane. Why is no one guarding the museum! Why am I doing this, exactly! Why aren’t we getting caught! What’s the point! Blood & Truth’s response to those exclamations is as follows: who gives a shit. At the end of the mission the brothers actually encounter Tony in oncoming traffic and issue him the jerk-off hand motion. Blood & Truth is a couple of idiots enjoying time that can only exist in an absurdist fantasy and it is beautiful.
As an immersive experience, Blood & Truth is most effective when it’s emulating a Hollywood spectacle. Jumping over rooftops, tossing a grenade in a helicopter, and blowing the fuel tank on a pursuing van all do well to mimic your favorite action movie. Blood & Truth’s best strike at originality comes with its climax when it performs a hilariously impossible but monstrously effective stunt inside of an airplane. The disbelief that Blood & Truth is actually going to push it that far is instantly squashed when you realize it’s actually happening, and that London Studio convincingly pulled it off.
It’s easy to see London Heist as Blood & Truth’s blueprint. There’s plenty of sitting and listening and feeling like you’re in the room and a part of a fragmented story. There’s a lot of riding in cars and shooting at motorcycles. There’s plenty of Serious Drama from people you barely know killing other people you barely know. Whereas earlier virtual reality games were forced by time and budget to launch what felt like a pitch or a prototype, Blood & Truth (built on the back of London Heist) arrives as a structured and polished three-act experience.
Blood & Truth, with Sony’s money and London Studio’s refined expertise, pushes virtual reality forward in ways that are both indulgent and important. Along with Astro Bot and Moss, it’s a game that feels like a game instead of an assembled series of experiments or a one-hour proof of concept. If virtual reality every really takes off, Blood & Truth’s comfortable absurdity will be one of the games people point to as an early example of getting it right.
Blood & Truth, either by intention or accident, also demonstrates why it is impossible to use virtual reality to replicate actual reality. Videogames are often castigated for their ludicrous approximations of rationality, which, yes. That’s the point. Who wants to escape to reality? Tangible freedom is vaulting over your son’s grave in Watch Dogs or getting through Super Mario 64 with the minimum amount of A-presses. Operating Blood & Truth as a questionably motivated killing machine with vague human relationships is the only way it can actually make sense. Ryan doesn’t need to exist anywhere but this game.
Blood & Truth is a savvy and seasoned virtual reality thriller confident in its suave posture and meticulous operation. It is simultaneously a bonkers riff on outrageous action cinema where it’s just as easy to imagine its main character as narrowly sentient tank treads with gun-hands born to decimate cloned hordes of bungling bald men. Blood & Truth works even as its internal truth is a grinning mystery.
