The Boys: Trigger Warning Review: Uninspired Stealth Boosted By Its Source Material

The Boys: Trigger Warning has the proverbial face only a mother could love. In spite of underwhelming visuals, it still pulls off stealth action that neither betrays its source material nor the tropes of its genre.

For those not familiar with The Boys, imagine if the Justice League or the Avengers were arrogant, socialite, super-powered jerks (‘supes’ is the canon term) working for and protected by a corrupt mega corporation. The titular Boys are a group of vigilantes working to take them down.

VR stealth games are an acquired taste. Some VR gamers who put on a headset want to actually do something and stealth works against that. Great stealth games are about waiting, usually crouched or otherwise out of sight, while plotting and memorizing guard patterns to either sneak past or take them out quietly. In that respect, The Boys: Trigger Warning delivers, bringing every stealth trope in the book to its roughly ten hours of gameplay.

Bad enemy AI that rarely thinks to look up? Yes. Getting spotted, only to hide and wait out the thirty seconds of alarms and guards before they forget they spotted you? Absolutely. The same enemies never noticing what should be very loud movement above their heads? Of course. A powerful, well armed protagonist that still manages to die far too quickly if attacked? You bet! I laughed each time I killed a guard and watched another walk past the body as if nothing was wrong. If you are expecting any innovations on the basic stealth formula, look elsewhere. For comparable games in VR, Digital Lode’s Espire series and Fast Travel Games’ Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice come to mind.

You play as Lucas Costa, who takes his daughters to visit The Armstrongs, a celebrity superhero family. Things go tragically wrong, leaving Lucas on the brink of death. He’s rescued by series regulars Butcher, Mother’s Milk, and Kimiko and injected with a drug called Compound V that saves his life and grants him superpowers. After this, he is recruited into The Boys with the promise of vengeance. It’s a fairly straightforward revenge story wrapped in the vulgar, violent world The Boys fans know and love.

With these artificial powers, starting with telekinesis, a ‘TK sense’ (X-ray vision), and a long range teleport, you infiltrate Vought to gather intel on and eventually confront the Armstrongs. Throughout the game are injectables called ‘Temp V’ that temporarily grant other abilities. Dosages are limited, but like any good stealth game, there are just enough refills scattered about to avoid going empty for too long, plus they regularly respawn. When you do use your powers to take enemies down, particularly the sneak-behind telekinetic kill, it’s very satisfying.

The game also ramps as it wears on. Every mission adds a new wrinkle in the form of new enemies or environmental challenges to test your mastery of Lucas’s powers as well as the restraint to keep from relying on them like a crutch. As you get better, the game raises the stakes to match.

Using new characters is smart because The Armstrongs and the Costas don’t have plot armor, meaning Arvore was free to do whatever it wanted to service the story. With that said, the best parts of the game are with the series’ cast. Butcher’s callous characterization is spot on. Homelander is a standout each time he appears and has the best dialogue in the game. The usage of Soldier Boy is surreal and excellent. Several of the show’s cast members voice their characters, lending some authenticity to the game as well.

There are collectibles in the form of documents and audio recordings for players into that sort of thing. I’m usually not, but thankfully these flesh out the world and contain Easter eggs for fans of the series, so I felt compelled to track them down.

The Boys is hurt by two issues: visuals and interactions. The series characters are at least recognizable, albeit a bit goofy, but this is at least in line with Arvore’s Pixel Ripped aesthetic. The flat and bland environments are the true letdown. You only interact with The Boys between missions, otherwise it’s just Butcher speaking through an ear piece while navigating drab hallways avoiding the same guards for most of the game. Then there are some visual quirks. If I killed a guard on a staircase, their blood hovered above in a flat circle. While scaling an elevator shaft, the area above me flickered in and out of existence. Walking side to side produced a mirrored, almost reprojection-like effect. Here’s hoping the upcoming PlayStation VR2 version gets a visual lift.

You physically touch half a dozen objects in this game. The Temp V syringes, enemies if using one specific Temp V ability, a hacking device, keycards, keycode terminals, and keyboards, the latter of which is just banged on. Your hands just don’t cooperate at times, especially in the vents and using keypads. Telekinesis and teleportation do most of the lifting here, leaving Trigger Warning without a sense of tactile presence I found myself longing for.

With all that said, I still liked Trigger Warning. There’s a tricky balancing act here, empowering the player to indulge in gloriously graphic violence, while still maintaining a belief that you can die at any moment. Trigger Warning pulls this off while still delivering an effective, if mostly predictable, story.

The Boys: Trigger Warning – Final Verdict

Trigger Warning mostly plays it safe, delivering a run-of-the-mill stealth game lifted by the world it is set in. The wry, dark humor of The Boys undercuts the earnestness of the Costas/Armstrong story and the game strikes a good balance between power complex and a genuine sense of danger.

I would recommend The Boys: Trigger Warning to specifically to fans of the series and players who enjoy stealth games. Others may otherwise find the pace too slow and the lack of physicality off-putting and with underwhelming graphics, it’s tough to recommend.

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