The Boys: Trigger Warning Review – Strong Fan Service, Weak Gameplay

The Boys: Trigger Warning Review

The Boys: Trigger Warning is a VR stealth-action game developed by Arvore. This is also coming to PlayStation VR2 in the future. You play as Lucas, a regular dad who ends up with telekinetic powers and is fueled by revenge. The Boys is a massive TV IP entering its last season this April. With this game, Arvore attempted to make the game as faithful to the TV show as possible. However, in the gameplay areas, the game leaves a lot to be desired. At least on the launch version for the Quest 3 and 3s.

The Boys Are Back

The show uses three characters: Mother’s Milk, Billy Butcher, and Kimiko. Character designs strongly resemble their real-life counterparts. For added immersion, Mother’s Milk, actor Lax Alonzo, lends his voice to the game. Though Karl Urban does not voice Billy Butcher, the voice actor who does, does a fantastic voice impersonation. It’s a spot-on job. Of course, Kimiko doesn’t speak, so her likeness has to convey thoughts and emotions through her expressions, which the game does a decent job with. Mother’s Milk and Butcher deliver the bulk of the game’s narrative, and it never became old.

The Boys: Trigger Warning is an engaging story of revenge. It leans into The Boy’s universe unabashedly with lots of foul language and violence. Adding to the ambience is Soldier Boy, who pops in occasionally and is on a constant mission to put you down. He goes hard at you, saying all the things no one wants to hear about themselves. It’s unusual in VR to get such a narrative-driven game, but this is the focus of Trigger Warning, and the story works very hard to keep the player engaged in that aspect. The game has twelve levels in total. The game divides these into 7 Main Missions and 5 Interludes, narrative moments that occur in a bowling alley, the game’s hub.

Superpowers  To Play With

The gameplay is all about using your own superpowers to get revenge on the super Armstrong family who killed your youngest daughter. You have a mix of permanent and temporary V powers at your disposal. The permanent abilities include telekinesis and teleportation. With telekinesis, you can open vents with the flick of a wrist or dual-wield random stuff lying around to kill guards. Your other powers come from Temp V, which you find throughout the game levels. Temp V use is dangerous though because it slowly kills normal human beings. Temporary powers include invisibility or large, crystal-like, spiky hands. So you can either stealth past guards or attack them directly. A nifty second use of the claw hands is that they can deflect bullets. A third temporary power becomes available later in the game: laser vision. It’s the most fun power, and the destruction you can inflict is a real blast to use.

The Boys Performance Problems

The listed gameplay length is 10 hours, but you’ll likely finish the game sooner. The game displays your health in a most annoying way, using blood on your face. It obscures your view, but thankfully, health regenerates quickly. There’s the expected VR comfort options, but in an unusual recommendation, you are told it is best to play the game seated. That is all fine and good, as that is my preferred way of playing unless it’s a physically active VR game. What’s even more usual though is choosing to play seated does not automatically calibrate your height. You have to go into another option and choose if you’re tall or short.

Sadly, all that hard work to capture The Boys’ world goes for naught. This is a very uncomfortable VR game to play. Frame rate performance is all over the place, and if you choose smooth turning, it’s even worse. The amount of stuttering when you turn or move is fatiguing and immersion-breaking. It’s only when you stop and physically look around, does the frame rate become smooth. The developers are relying on asynchronous space warp to keep the game as close to a steady frame rate as possible. The problem is that the game can’t maintain the minimum frame rates consistently to achieve that goal. So, if you are sensitive to VR motion sickness, beware!

Get ready to die a lot because of teleporting mistakes. In a section where Homelander chases you, I died several times because of the erratic frame rate. Very frustrating. Heavy use of asynchronous space warp creates a horrible wobbling effect, most notably with your hands. The stuttering gets progressively worse the heavier the action gets. The game is either badly optimized or cannot run on a Quest 3. After playing Batman and Deadpool on the Quest 3; I suspect the former.

Repetitive Missions

Gameplay-wise, the missions are very repetitive and follow the same formula with the occasional boss encounters. You start with a couple of briefings, one large one and then a smaller one. Then you “break” into Vault Tower. Sometimes it takes nothing more than just walking through a door, or you may even start already inside the tower. From there, you look for codes or fuses, crawl through vents, hack terminals, and then you leave.

Lack of Interactivity

Some of the gameplay elements are really weak. Hacking is the worst culprit. All you do is wave your arms, whereas in other games it is its own mini-game. All you do is spam a virtual keyboard. Dumb. Also, dumb are the NPCs. They are even dumber, and the stealth sections with them are weak. You can crawl by them out in the open with no fear of being caught. It’s the uneven frame rate that is your biggest nemesis. Even with alarms going off everywhere, it’s still easy to kill all the guards. Not just because they are dumb, and there are only three variations of the guards, there is an overabundance of random tools and knives lying around everywhere. It all becomes very boring, very quickly.

After Mother’s Milk and Butcher finish talking to you, you cannot interact with them. They basically become statues. Another minus is the boss fights. They are mediocre and not really rewarding. The Boys: Trigger Warning is an average game with a good story. The story is the only thing that keeps pulling you back to find out more. Even hardcore fans of the TV show will be hard-pressed to finish the game.

I didn’t enjoy my time with the game. Its technical shortcomings make it feel like a chore to play. That said, some of the powers, especially telekinesis, are fun to experiment with. Since this is a Sony product, it will be interesting to see how it performs on the PSVR2. The Quest version, however, desperately needs optimization. That’s disappointing, particularly given how polished other superhero VR games like Batman and Deadpool have been. The game is currently available on the Quest 3 and 3S, but it may be best to wait for patches or for impressions of the upcoming PSVR2 version before jumping in.

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