Well into 2018, we are past the point where VR is a new and novel experiment. Had Supermassive Games‘ Bravo Team released when the PSVR launched, we could at least excuse the game’s milquetoast nature as a first, uncertain step; an experiment in trying to bring arcadey, cover-based shooting to a new format. Released two years into the PSVR’s lifespan, however, Bravo Team already comes off as archaic, a game that’s been outclassed several times over in the system’s first year.
Bravo Team’s banality is obvious during its opening minutes. You and your online co-op partner or A.I. brother-in-arms are charged with escorting the president of a made-up eastern European country back home to deliver a unifying speech that will hopefully bring peace to her nation. Of course it goes wrong; the president’s envoy gets blown to bits, and a deposed military leader kickstarts a bloody coup d’etat that you and your partner must shoot your way through in order to get home. The mission plays out with stone-faced seriousness, with the monotony of our two masked heroes broken up only by the determined British timbre of your commanding officer. There isn’t even a musical score to accentuate the action, so even the most dramatic moments happen in an uncaring void.
The set up might be indistinguishable from Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, or any number of grim, washed-out shooters, but, really, Bravo Team’s gameplay has more in common with games like Time Crisis. Most of your time is spent hiding behind cover, popping out to line up your shots and fire. You can play with the DualShock 4 or the Move controllers (and this is even one of the few times where movement feels natural with the latter). However, the PS Aim gun controller is where it’s at in that regard, and what thrills do exist in the game come from the inherent thrill of the Aim lending a dose of immersion.
You also get a little bit more freedom to move than in a game like Time Crisis. You can point your gun or just tilt the PSVR headset at a certain area and you’ll get a visual prompt telling you whether you can move there or not. The flaw here being that actual movement takes the game out of first person into a third-person view that rips that immersion away every single time.
The presentation, with its dull, anemic color schemes straight out of 2007 and a rampant, unfathomable problem with pop-in and blurry textures, is the most prominent flaw. The same three classes of enemies you encounter in the first stage–generic grunt, armored grunt, armored grunt with chaingun–are the same ones you see every step of the way. The last half hour or so introduces two sections with melee soldiers and snipers, but they’re gone almost as soon as they enter the scene. There’s only four guns–a pistol, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle–and you only see two of those in the last 30 minutes as well.
Seemingly in an effort to break up the straightforward gunplay, stealth kills are possible. But outside of the tutorial, it’s impossible to maintain stealth for more than two or three enemies before, without fail, another enemy stands at an angle where he can’t be stealth killed. It doesn’t help that your supposedly silenced pistol gives away your position 75% of the time. The most fun in Bravo Team comes from its online co-op, where at least you have a partner to bounce dialogue off of, give directions to, or request recovery when you’ve fallen. It’s a salve, albeit a temporary one.
Instead, Bravo Team slogs on, stranding you in huge spaces, throwing wave after wave of cannon fodder your way, making its short play time feel hours longer that it actually is. Bravo Team is a game that feels unsure and tentative about ideas that have been tried and tested for years now, even in VR.
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