Blood & Truth review: viscerally cinematic

Some reviewers have compared Blood & Truth to the sassy British crime films of Guy Ritchie, the most obvious similarities being London settings and cockney-sounding nogoodniks. The game is packed with balls-to-the-wall spectacle, from intensely visceral car chases to “bullet time” moments that slow the pace and ramp up the gunplay. More than one high octane sequence culminates with the player falling through the air from extreme heights; I was reminded of a skydiving sequence from Rodert Rodriguez’s VR film The Limit, during which I contemplated the possibility of witnessing the return of my breakfast. 

Blood & Truth’s connection to cinema was made by the creators themselves, marketing the experience as “a hard-hitting shooter with all the explosive action and drama of a Hollywood blockbuster.” The pundits agreed with that definition, one describing it as “a playable action movie packed with guns, grime and gangsters.” Another said it offers “a chance to dive into a Hollywood action movie,” drawing comparisons to the bullet-riddled balleticism of auteur John Woo. And another called it a production that “succeeds in allowing you to be the action movie star you’ve always wanted to be.”

Not to sound facetious, but, if you wanted to be an action movie star, wouldn’t you want to be able to move? Blood & Truth uses node-based navigation, meaning instead of being able to walk around freely you’re only able to glide between predetermined points. Like in the atmospheric William Castle-esque VR horror experience Wilson’s Heart, which is presented in rich monochrome, the node-based system allows the creation of more sculpted images, the virtual camera in a fixed position. But the tradeoff is never justified, and even at the time these productions were released, the system felt primitive and passé.

In Blood & Truth we play Ryan Marks, an ex SAS soldier who belongs to a family of gangsters. The narrative involves a power grab by East End goon Tony Sharp (played by Steven Hartley, who is mocapped, like the rest of the cast) after the death of Ryan’s father. We spend a considerable amount of time running around with our brother Nick (Jay Taylor), who picks us up from the airport in his convertible. Nick smokes a vape while driving, and you can have a go too: if you exhale a visualization of smoke appears, the headset registering breath through its microphone.

Blood & Truth accelerates (no pun intended) during its carnage-laden car chase scenes, which render the node-based system irrelevant (because we can’t move around in a car anyway). The first arrives about 15 minutes in, the vehicle whizzing down sand-flanked roads of a Middle Eastern country, with another person behind the wheel, allowing maximum concentration on the job at hand—mowing down baddies. As the game rolls along, the gunplay’s broken up by activities such as lockpicking and climbing, the latter integrated with a set piece involving the rescuing of a family member from a building about to be demolished. Wouldn’t you know it? The demolition occurs while we’re still inside.

But the moment that keeps rumbling around my mind fascinates me not because of its spectacle but its temporal aspects, and its connection to cinematic technique. Falling, again, from a high place, this time with a handy ol’ parachute, the experience cuts from an eerily beautiful fire and debris-filled skyline to a bittersweet moment depicting the smiling face of a loved one holding up family photographs. Alone in the sky during one existential moment, experiencing a sweet memory the next. 

In traditional film it took a long time—an entire generation—for artists to realise how time could be manipulated, and to refine the tools through which this is achieved, including flashbacks, flash forwards and parallel cutting. We’re only just beginning to see how these techniques look and feel in virtual reality, as content creators explore which ones have life and purpose in the new medium, and which should be left sealed inside cinema history. The comparative newness of VR, coupled with cinematic tropes and style, creates contradictory feelings: old but new, fresh but familiar. Blood & Truth is kind of a movie, but it’s not.