The Haunted Hoard: Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (PS4)
Rollercoaster simulators feel like a natural fit for virtual reality. We made do for a long time with screens placed on shaking arcade machines and other acceptable but not fully immersive experiences, so seeing a rollercoaster sim embrace virtual reality as it rises in prominence almost makes too much sense. However, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood takes things a step further, pushing beyond the limits of trying to imitate a real thrill ride by mixing in the elements you’d expect of a haunted house and a gallery shooter as well, turning this VR game into a well-realized mix of some carnival favorites.
Things begin very much like a carnival as well. The first level of the game is really just a roller coaster rail shooter level, the player moving forward automatically in line with the track and using their PS4 or PlayStation Move controllers to aim two guns at targets set up by the man running the show. Things do kick off with a small bit of spookiness, the unusual amusement park owner’s carnival out in the snowy woods unsettling but not too unusual as you shoot at simple things like pop-up targets and duck decoys. It’s a nice ease in to things where you get a chance to learn the feel of your weapons, the shooting feeling natural and reloading coming with both a button option or the classic light gun arcade method of pointing your guns away from the screen to reload. At the end of your first ride though, things take a strange turn when tanks full of chemicals unleash gasses that our unseen player character sucks in and begins to experience some very strange hallucinations.
What began as a slightly spooky shooting gallery on your roller coaster ride starts to get much more surreal and much more dangerous. Whereas before all you really had to worry about were things like leaning your body to the side to avoid low-hanging beams or shooting barriers to open the way forward, the roller coaster rides of your hallucinations begin to feature aggressive monsters, deranged weapon-wielding clowns, and some downright demonic creatures. There will still be extra targets to shoot for the purposes of racking up high scores, including hidden objects in each stage to earn bonuses and achievements for shooting, but now your guns need to be used for protection as well, because these creatures are out for the kill.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood borrows some elements from the game it’s spinning off from, and while you don’t need to have played Until Dawn to appreciate any of the horror or the light bit of story to the affair, it is a treat for those who might recognize certain characters and creatures who really get to shine as horror monsters here where the laws of believability don’t restrict their actions. The Psycho, for example, isn’t just a murderous man in a mask here. He can literally become a giant head looming over you through a rapidly crumbling environment or a bullet sponge who just keeps stomping towards you as you try to put him down before he reaches the roller coaster. Levels in general embrace both grounded and absurd ideas for interesting paths for your roller coaster ride. A trip into a meat factory has the butchered pigs lurch to life and scream as you end up on the same butchering conveyor belt that these suffering hogs have endured, and another area features gigantic dolls peering down on the player with recording equipment as they imitate unsettling scenes made worse by the uncanny appearance of the toys. However, then you have places like the mines where claustrophobic tunnels and darkness get played up, with the best moment perhaps being the dark elevator where creatures will latch onto it from all angles, the player needing to hold their vulnerable spot until they’ve reached their destination. You can usually expect areas like the cellblock to slowly go from realistic scares to the kind of absurd horrors only possible in a virtual experience, and as one might expect, there are plenty of jump scares meant to make this ride a bit more terrifying with sudden surprises.
The genres being blended together here all mingle well. Rollercoasters already have the terrifying thrill of fast drops and the anticipation of a heart-pounding moment to come making the slow rises tense, so the horror elements applied to Until Dawn: Rush of Blood increase the presence and power of these quite well. Light gun games already often rely on the rail shooter formula to move a character around while they shoot, so putting the rail shooter on some actual rails by way of a roller coaster just makes for natural contextualization. Rail shooters even have a long history of using the horror genre for creatures that are quick to kill and appropriately threatening to a well-armed player. The level they pull their weight in this experience is certainly skewed though. Across the game’s 7 levels it does an excellent job of keeping the enemy types and horror setpieces varied so it always feels like you’re seeing something new and well-realized. The rollercoaster elements are certainly meant to feed into this, the speed picking up at times to feed into it but the feeling sometimes disorienting because there’s no real physical feedback to make you feel like you’re actually riding in one.
The light gun gameplay is actually where Until Dawn: Rush of Blood would need to push harder to become something that truly delivers on this intelligent mix of genres. The first issue is really a hardware one, where PlayStation Move’s usually reliable controllers can have odd drifting issues, meaning the action can sometimes come to a halt as you need to recalibrate your gun cursors. Even when things are going swimmingly though, the shooting still feels just a touch too brainless. Different difficulties do mean the strength and durability of some enemy and boss monsters will change depending on how rough you want the experience to be, but the tactics to it all are pretty simple. By default you use two pistols with endless ammunition so long as you reload now and again, so the game designs around these and seems hesitant to push too hard against the player. A watchful eye is pretty much all you need to make sure that the moment a zombie, spider, or other threat appears, you can just quickly dispatch them with your pistols by focusing fire briefly. They really are just targets that can move a little and will hurt you if you don’t shoot them first, but even when the game gets a bit more daring with hard arrangements, you can expect something like an explosive barrel present to immediately finish them off or a new gun that can do the job instead.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood features some decent weapon variety that does give you a feeling of power when you grab the guns for the most part. Shooting a weapon box will gift you something like the rapid fire machine gun or explosive power of a shotgun, although strangely enough it’s the flare gun that serves as your strongest option as it fires a shot that literally explodes and can pretty much clear the screen of regular enemies. The only weak weapon conceptually might be the revolver that is stronger than your pistols but doesn’t feel like it fills a new niche or has clear increased power behind its shots. These weapons mostly add a small bit of variety when they crop up, but since you can often miss shooting the weapon boxes due to the roller coaster movements, these don’t get embraced as much as you’d hope. On top of that, their ammo limits are somewhat strange. You have a set amount of ammo to a gun pickup until its gone, but you can’t switch away from it until it’s empty, meaning that if you want to go for optional targets or a good score, sometimes you’re burning useful shotgun shells on background items. There’s not much strategy to their use either because you just have to use them up no matter the situation, but they do change the pace of the regular shooting in an enjoyable way and are more a wasted opportunity for variety than truly flawed.
Speaking of wasted variety opportunities, that describes most bosses pretty well. Just like with regular enemies you simply open fire on many of these until they’re dead, they just take longer to put down. When a boss does have weaknesses or a set method of taking them down, they instead are a bit too straightforward to really feel different from firing on targets. This is again not so much a problem as it is an area that could have really pushed the shooting out of its enjoyable yet basic design, but they did at least think of one interesting way to not just change things up but make this short game more replayable. Levels feature many alternate paths you can open with well-placed shots, meaning a second trip can have new scares and shooting galleries, getting high scores requiring some thought rather than just a good aim. It doesn’t improve the gameplay too much technically, but giving you a bit more to explore with an effective if unimaginitive shooting system means justifying a second trip through a stage comes more easily even to those who might not normally replay levels.
THE VERDICT: Part roller coaster sim, part light gun gallery, and part horror game, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood found a complementary mix of gaming genres that all feed into each other quite well, the horror visuals spectacular, varied, and effective throughout and the roller coaster VR keeping the player moving through this amusement ride well. The rail shooter gameplay gives you more to do than just gawk at the visuals though, making the game more active and the scares more legitimate since they can kill you if you aren’t quick to fire. However, the creativity in the designs of the levels and monsters is not matched by the fairly basic light gun gameplay, shooting things feeling enjoyable but not going the extra distance they should have to make the giant creatures and strange areas the spectacular shooting galleries they could have been.
And so, I give Until Dawn: Rush of Blood for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating, and one that definitely had the potential to be Great if it had handled its weapon and boss designs better. The swapping between moving monster targets and regular shooting gallery targets wouldn’t be so bad if those parts were done better, because then they could supplement the more explosive or creative uses of the guns that sadly never showed up. Compared to something like the Resident Evil Chronicles games that made even regular enemy encounters appropriately dangerous and aim focused, you can mostly unload pistols freely here to take care of most of your troubles, the special weapons being fun breaks from the norm but not getting put through their paces. The ride is still wild and full of fun frights to justify climbing aboard, and the VR mostly helps every part of the game work a touch better with its immersive arrangement, but the shooting gameplay ends up acceptably fun in a game that could have been amazing if more of its monsters and bosses were as fearsome as they appeared.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood is still a good game no doubt, one that shows that VR can enhance an experience pretty well without dominating it, especially when the three component genres featured here are all ones that work well in virtual reality. Looking with the headset and aiming guns with the Move controllers is natural and lets you peer back to shoot things you missed, the horror is amplified by having the protective barrier of a TV screen removed, and the rollercoaster ride both serves as a smart way of moving you around while also tapping into the thrills of one with moments of increased speed or unusual twists. It’s quite easy to get wrapped up in the execution of all of these, especially when they are mostly successful at making their parts of the game interesting, so don’t let the simplicity of the light gun elements dissuade you from taking a ride through this terrifying virtual amusement park.