Medal of Honor in VR takes you to an uncanny valley of historical gaming

There are Nazi soldiers up ahead. I can see them. I have options: Pull out a grenade and kill them, duck down and try to avoid their shots, or inject myself with quick-heal syringes. I eventually kill them all, but I collide with a very real pile of storage boxes in the corner of my home office where I've set up a VR play area. Then the level fades to black. 

This isn't what war is like. Not that I've ever fought a war. But what am I doing here, exactly? I pull off my VR headset and decide to take a break.

EA's big-budget PC VR-only version of Medal of Honor is here, a game created by developer Respawn in conjunction with Oculus. But in a year when I've been surprised and impressed by many virtual games while being at home, this game isn't one of them.

I've had surprisingly emotional experiences in VR, and also explored detailed worlds. I've played well-wrought first-person-shooter VR epics like Half-Life: Alyx, but I've also gone through documentary experiences that transformed my understanding of a topic, like The Book of Distance, which took me through a story of Japanese internment in Canada during World War II.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, so far, is none of these. It's a WWII-themed shooter game that's infused with an impressive level of detail, but lands in an awkward uncanny valley. It's more first-person shooter than historical record, but it feels like it wants to be both. And I don't think that works for me.

I played on an Alienware 15 with just enough graphics power to run the game, and connected with an Oculus Quest 2 via Oculus Link. The Quest 2 can easily double as a PC VR headset, and it generally handles the job well, with the exception of the awkward side-connection for the USB cable, which weighs down one side of my head a bit.

The nearly 180GB download is massive, and yet the game's storyline is broken up into pretty small episodic chunks, leaping around to missions set across Europe. The settings are stunning, and the feeling of immersion as I reach for weapons or duck to hide from enemies can be convincing. But anytime any character with me opens their mouth or looks at me, I'm thrown out of the illusion. The NPC companions with me look more like last-gen game character models than what I'd expect from bleeding-edge VR, their eyes not quite focusing on mine, their dialogue corny, their janky movement not quite right. 

I think about this game compared with Star Wars Squadrons, another recent EA-produced VR-optimized game. Squadrons works so much better for me, maybe because it knows what it is. In a fighter cockpit, I can fight in Star Wars battle levels and just enjoy the ride. I don't have to see other people much. I'm going it alone. It tries for one thing, and does it. The levels are long enough that I can sink in and get used to the journey. 

Medal of Honor is far more demanding on my body, my movement and my reflexes, and I get killed a lot. Also, I feel like every time I start to get my sea legs in a level, and sink in, the mission's over. And then I'm back in the awkward dialogue phase again.

A bonus gallery of short documentary films can be viewed from a side room in the game's headquarters-like military HQ main menu areas, where missions and in-game accomplishments can be viewed. These short films, which interview real veterans of World War II as they revisit parts of Europe where they fought in the war, are moving and powerful. I loved those films more than the game itself.

If you're looking for a multiplayer-ready PC VR WWII action game, Medal of Honor is probably your best (and only?) bet. But I'd rather go back to Half-Life Alyx and play alone, or I'd rather watch films and read books on World War II. Medal of Honor falls in an awkward space in between for me.