A roller coaster-themed rail shooter, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood PS VR So it’s understandable that there was some hype surrounding the announcement of Supermassive’s spiritual successor, The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR. Unfortunately, this is a follow-up, a letdown by overly long levels, boring combat encounters, and a dark shadow of some pretty poor visuals.
There are few positives, but they are not completely non-existent. UK developers are making good use of the PSVR2 Sense Controller. For example, arm both hands with pistols that can be upgraded with weapon pickups at certain moments in the game. Tracking throughout is flawless, and handling is enhanced by subtle use of haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. You can also feel the rattling sound of the truck moving on the rail.
The campaign has its moments too. There’s a sequence in which you go through a tunnel filled with animated corpse flesh, and you physically feel the appendages hitting your face through the headset’s built-in rumble motors. Use to detect every blink. In other words, the scene changes every time you close your eyes. These are heartbreaking moments to be sure, but that’s part of the release’s intended charm.
Unfortunately, these standout examples are sandwiched between four or so hours of terrible light gun shooting. You’ll find yourself blowing away poorly-animated enemies with minimal negative feedback. Sure, you’ll see some weird cranial collapse, but most enemies will shrug off the bullets as if nothing happened.
The lackluster boss battles most unfortunately illustrate this. With hundreds of bullets raining down on your body, you have absolutely no sense that you’re doing any damage. Worse, the encounters are the same and predictable. It attacks and kills a lot of the tension the title is trying to create.While I appreciate the attempt to extend the experience, the levels are too long and lose any incentive to replay.
It’s a shame because there are different routes you can take to facilitate multiple playthroughs, and you can make some minor decisions about whether to save, abandon, or kill the supporting cast characters. Note that the plot devices that tie the sloppy storyline together are hardly worth mentioning, other than the long load times each time you transition from gameplay to cutscenes and back again.
3D audio is used pretty well, and Supermassive makes good use of the headset’s HDR panel, which can make the game very dark at times. But by and large, the visuals are subpar. Even compared to the original PSVR game, this is pretty middling, and we’ve seen what the developers can do with Horizon Call of the Mountain and Resident Evil Village. The fact that it’s blurry is frankly inexplicable.
The levels improve slightly as we progress through sections inspired by House of Ashes and The Devil in Me, but we still found the puzzle integration to be slowing and inconsistent with what the developers were trying to achieve. For example, one sequence sees him firing a flare gun at a giant switch, while another section requires him to shoot a flowerpot to pass by a swinging blade. The fact that some of these ideas are repeated is incredible.
There are a few instances where the studio really leans on the side of a roller coaster. Moving at breakneck speeds while being chased by enemies or with lightning crackling through the sky is a lot of fun, but you actually spend a lot of the game moving incredibly slowly. In our eyes, a rail shooter should be a thrilling ride from start to finish, but Switchback VR is mostly less of a whine.
Conclusion
It continued to evade Supermassives until Dawn, and now even Rush of Blood appears out of reach. Switchback VR is a sloppy game that rivals its acclaimed PSVR predecessor, offering low-budget visuals, lousy combat encounters, and fairly low-energy level design.There are some memorable moments and some might find the jump scares fun but this should have been and could have been So much more.
