A few years ago, Electronic Arts outraged Medal of Honor: the 2010 reboot and the 2012 Warfighter turned out to be defiantly dumb action films - so faceless that they buried the series they were about to revive. Danger Close studio was disbanded, and Medal of Honor was frozen until better times. The franchise that once dragged behind the Hollywood war shooter genre has finally given way to Call of Duty and Battlefield .
A few years later, Facebook came to EA, shook its bottomless wallet and offered to revive the Medal of Honor again- already for virtual reality helmets. The game gave up flirting with modern war, returned to its native World War II, and the Respawn studio , an expert in military shooters, and even with people who made the same "correct" Medal of Honor in the late 90s and early 2000s.
The first "wrong" makes itself felt at the very beginning of the storyline campaign: Above and Beyond has incredibly short levels. It's not only about frequent downloads, but also about the design: each episode is clearly cut off by blackout, and each level ends with pretentious music with a poster on which is written "VICTORY". This is a reference to the roots of the series: there the episodes also ended with a similar heroic picture. But you have no idea how inappropriate this is in Above and Beyond.
Compounding the whole story. There are many cutscenes in Above and Beyond (especially by VR standards), but all of them are also triggered through blackout: you seem to be teleported to the place of conversation. This happens even if there are no obvious reasons: for example, you approach a table around which other characters are already standing and waiting for you. It would seem, what prevents you from simply starting the scene animation? When the cinematic insert ends, the game again lowers the curtain, "tidies up" after itself, removing unnecessary from the frame, and only then returns free control to you - yes, you cannot move during cut-scenes, just turn your head and wave your arms out of boredom.
Due to the constant blackouts and to the stupidity of the annoying VICTORY screen, it feels like the Above and Beyond story campaign- not a whole story, but a set of colorful clips that you watch on TikTok. Minute video, where some game is going on - swipe up - next clip. Minute video - swipe up - Minute video - swipe up. Repeat until you find something interesting (or until you get bored). It's incredibly annoying, because you expect from VR first of all the integrity of what is happening.
Ideologically Above and Beyond is a classic shooter about the Second World War. You travel all over Europe and take part in operations based on real events. Without meticulous historicity - there is a swastika, but they hardly remember the participation of the USSR, and the Germans talk about our character as extremely polite, gender-neutral, because the game allows you to be at least a masculine white dork, even a dark-skinned woman.
Shooting obviously takes up the largest portion of the gameplay. If, say, in Half-Life: Alyx the action was local, relatively rare and with few opponents, then Above and Beyond resembles traditional Medal of Honor: there are a lot of people who want to take a dose of lead, you have to shoot constantly, weapons are generously scattered across the levels, there are enough different subtypes of rifles and machine guns.
The barrels feel good: they have recoil, the sound of the shots is juicy, the reloading is simple by VR standards, but it allows you to quickly return to battle. One of my favorite tricks is the ability to pull out a grenade pin with your teeth. Immediately imagine yourself as a burnt out, self-confident warrior! It's a pity, the opponents are stupid - only a rare moment when the enemy kicks your grenade is reminiscent of the amusing tricks of the AI from Medal of Honor 1999.
Overall Above and Beyondwants to be a fast and dynamic shooter - a commendable pursuit, because usually VR gravitates towards something slower. But good shooting is spoiled by little things.
There are serious problems with grabbing objects. The game constantly pushes into your hand not what you want to take - if you bend over something that is on the ground, then a pistol constantly jumps towards you from your right hip. If two things lie nearby (or, God forbid, three), then an attempt to take one of them turns into a magic ritual, where you make strange passes with your hands. The magazine with cartridges, located on the left hip, is not always blindly pulled out.
Suffering from crooked grasping is amplified by ill-conceived control over the playing body. Imagine. You are holding a submachine gun in your right hand. Treating syringes are on the left sleeve. An instinctive movement in battle is to shift the machine gun from the right hand to the left and grab the syringe with the free right hand. But the game, for some reason, does not allow you to do this: you must remove the machine gun behind your back - only after that you can take the syringe from the sleeve. And for some reason, they do not allow you to pick up a grenade if you have the maximum number of them. It happens that you want to grab a shell lying on the level and immediately throw it into a crowd of Nazis. But it is impossible, since the inventory is full - if you please, throw only those grenades that hang on your chest.
Above and Beyond could plug gameplay flaws with the sheer scope of a story campaign. Respawn had enough money for production : the game does not hesitate to shuffle locations, arrange staged episodes and show the characters up close. The vast majority of VR games online avoid this, because intimacy with characters requires detailed facial animation, and detailed facial animation is very expensive. In Above and Beyond , the way the characters move is no problem - it's nice to look at them.
In a global sense, there are no problems with the richness of the plot: you will visit France, Normandy and Norway, fly a bomber, arrange a train hijacking, infiltrate a submarine, and so on. At the same time, the game will pamper you with nice landscapes with beautifully flowing light and models with good detail - it can be interesting to turn around in your hands and look at all sorts of pens, compasses and figurines.
As with gameplay, implementation miscalculations spoil a good concept. The plot rushes between two fires. Basically, it is served in a half-joking tone - they talk about war seriously, but the mood is rather light, and the characters regularly joke. Yet in a couple of places Above and Beyondtries to catch up with drama, which looks inappropriate against the general background (and do not forget about the TikTok-shredder - you will not be given time to imbue the moment). And the game introduces a villain, so that then suddenly and very shamefully merge him in the finale.
Scripts also hinder immersion - sometimes they are too crude, sometimes they do not work at all. Here you penetrate behind enemy lines in the form of a cleaner. If you take any object (even an apple) and put it back, the game will consider that you have started an attack - the alarm will instantly go up, an American spy will be immediately identified in you, shooting will open, and a "game over" will come. And you just picked up and put the apple in place! Sometimes characters after cut-scenes freeze in unnatural poses and stare straight into your soul with unblinking eyes. Last time I checked, Above and Beyond was a WW2 action movie, not a creep horror!
Even the graphics are uneven. Static scenery and pedestrian sections look decent, but in dynamic episodes they sometimes return 2002, when Allied Assault was released.: fences on a trip on a tank do not fall apart, but simply disappear, falling planes awkwardly fall through your train, the surface of the ground from a bomber looks like a naked texture porridge.
At the same time, Above and Beyond has monstrously high system requirements, and from the performance settings there is only the picture resolution. Even my bundle of Ryzen 5 3600X and GeForce RTX 3080 sometimes had brakes. What is going on there on more democratic assemblies, I'm afraid to imagine. The owners of the Valve Index say that the RTX 3080 fails to squeeze out 120 fps, that is, one of the most important features of the helmet cannot be used.
Incidentally, the landing at Omaha Beach is simply bad here - even at the conceptual level. I think this is a separate fat flaw, because this beach is a landmark level for all shooters about the Second World War. It's a crime to miss the chance to make an insanely cool D-Day in VR.
Comparisons of Above and Beyond with Half-Life: Alyx cannot be avoided - both with a very large budget, both for a high-profile franchise, both were touted as system sellers. But after release, it's clear that Valve understands the importance of VR's unique features much better than Respawn.
For example, Alyx has an incredibly well-developed tactility : virtual fingers glide correctly over surfaces, wrap objects in different ways, transmit light vibrations to the controllers when touched, and allow you to open doors with a simple push. The world around us is very, very tangible.
In Above and Beyond , there is no smell of similar tangibility: yes, here you can also take some items (and, unlikeAlyx , successfully killing opponents with them), but the same cool sense of presence is no longer enough. In Alyx, whole episodes and mechanics are built on the physical properties of the environment (I have nightmares about the headcrab that knocked down bottles near Jeff), and in Above and Beyond even the unfortunate SOS button works with great difficulty, because the fingers seem to live separate from hitboxes.
Valve turned out to be largely conservative in the design of Alyx - even free movement was screwed there in the last weeks before release. However, what the new Half-Life still has is licked to a shine and strikes with its filigree. Meanwhile, Above and Beyond tries to pull a standard attraction from war shooters onto the VR shell, only occasionally recalling that hands in VR are capable of not only pulling the trigger.
And yet, Above and Beyond has an ace up its sleeve, about which the language does not dare to say something bad - the gallery. The first parts of Medal of Honor were accompanied by cuts from real archived videos. The new game also has live clips. Finished the task - you can go to the gallery in the main menu, sit on a virtual chair and turn on documentaries on the projector.
And my God, how delicious they are! Especially for the sake of Above and Beyond, the team roamed the world, filmed mesmerizing camera angles from drones, made 360-degree videos, interviewed eyewitnesses of those terrible events, took them to places of military glory and even helped with long-standing desires.
The veteran receives a uniform for the first time. His hands are shaking - he dreamed of such a uniform 75 years ago, when he went to war. “Turn away,” the elderly Frenchwoman asks. She has visited the concentration camp where her brother died and is ready to burst into tears for the first time in decades. “I love mom, dad, everyone ,” the sailor recalls the entry in the found diary. It belonged to a man who was slowly dying on a raft in the middle of the ocean with his companions.
These stories are so beautifully filmed, there is so much sincerity and worldly wisdom in them that tears come to my eyes. I'm not exaggerating - I actually cried a couple of times. Not at all the emotion you'd expect from the secondary bonus section in a swanky action movie. And this creates a striking contrast - you leave the plot campaign, where a lively Polish scientist has just fervently trained in the pronunciation of the word motherfucker, and you find yourself in stories where the dramas are not simulated, but real. Why wasn't Above and Beyond itself the same?
***
You can talk about what's broken in Above and Beyond for a long time - it's a big game with a huge amount of work. Let's say, besides the plot, there is a survival mode and multiplayer. True, the latter was dead already three days after the release - in several matches I came across only three people, the rest of the slots were always occupied by ingenious bots. VR isn't popular enough to support life in optional multiplayer appendages.
A lot of work has been thrown in, but its quality leaves much to be desired: Respawn seemed to really like doing this project (it really has notes of tender love for the first parts of the series), but the studio had no idea how to make VR shooters. New Medal of Honorwould be insanely impressive in 2016, when the primitive Arizona Sunshine was considered the king of virtual reality . Now, in the post- Half-Life: Alyx era , Above and Beyond has a ton of childhood sores.
Some of the holes will be patched up with patches - in the very first update, they removed the screens with POBEDOJ and left them only at the end of the six main plot points (but this does not save much from the feeling of "clip-like"). They also promise to add advanced graphics settings. Maybe even the multiplayer will be reanimated by making it shareware. However, ordinary updates cannot save Above and Beyond - it needs a radical change in the underlying systems.
Enjoy Above and Beyondit's still possible: the series has returned to its roots, the inspiring melodies of Michael Giacchino sound in the background , and in VR there are now no other Hollywood shooters about the Second World War, where you can spend 13 hours in a story campaign. But the impression that Above and Beyond is morally outdated does not go away. VR did not have another powerful system seller this year.
Pros: Great documentary short films in the gallery; large single player campaign; high-budget production by VR standards; in some places very beautiful graphics; better than the 2010 Medal of Honor .
Minuses: extremely finely chopped levels; awkward plot; control accuracy problems; monstrous system requirements; a general sense of outdated game design against the background of Half-Life: Alyx.