Boss Fighters

You were meant to join the fighters, not destroy them. "Are the famous last words," as you decimate a city and lay it to ruin.

In an epic battle between good and evil, you’ll be choosing the side of the boss or the fighters. Destroying the town and fighters or defeating the boss, each with their own unique game mechanics and play style, you’ll be able to explore a fully destructible playing field, which both boss and fighters will need to use to their own advantages.

Gameplay

So what can you expect once you boot up the game? A bright and colorful world in a comic book fashion of art style. Enjoyable to look at, even though it doesn't delve into a highly detailed art style. Taking into account the game is styled in an alpha stage and is crossplay between PC and VR, it has to make some compromises to have it run as smoothly as it does for both.

As you can read, the game has an interesting concept, combining both VR and PC players into a single game, where, as a VR player, you’ll play as the boss battling it out against 4 fighters on PC. This brings some very nice mechanics and gameplay into one game that I had not yet experienced before. Although the game isn't completely smooth in the interaction yet, it is quite enjoyable running around as a fighter, making sure to use the terrain to hide from the big bad boss as much as possible.

Boss Fighters does a good job at providing enough of a hide-and-seek chase to bring excitement into the mix. This, of course, heavily depends on the skill and experience of the boss player. Overall, I had a lot of moments in the hide-and-seek elements where I was on the edge of my seat, wondering if I did a good enough job running away and hiding to survive the next boss attack and if I would get grabbed by its big robotic arms.

With a destructible playing field, I more than once got struck with a piece of debris and saw glass shatter as I was trying to escape the boss, which I think is a very cool element that the game added in and brings forth some nice ways for the boss to eliminate hiding places and have extra options to kill and combat the fighters. Although I must admit I’m not the biggest fan of traversing debris that is seemingly easy to jump over but has me traverse it as if it is a ledge of a building. There is definitely room for improvement there, especially if you are in a chase or trying to clear a very open part of the battlefield.

As a fighter, you’ll have four weapons to choose from, each, of course, with its own playstyle and strengths and weaknesses, totally up to your playstyle. Besides the four weapons, there are four gadgets you can choose from as well, which basically help you traverse the battlefield with a bonus movement. The current weapons and gadgets are nice, but seeing this increase would be a very welcomed addition. For the current state of the game, it gives a good feel of the potential and offers enough differentiation to play with your preferred weapon and playstyle.

With the game, you’ll quickly find out that your ammo is very limited for most weapons, three shots before you’ll have to go on the hunt for ammo. This is highlighted not just for the fighters but for the boss as well, which I think is very smart, as it offers a good chance for the boss to catch some running fighters in need of some ammo. Furthermore, it increases the need for strategic movement as well as coop play from the fighters. On this note, I’ll have to say that an outline of your fighter comrades would be a very nice addition to the game as it currently can be confusing where your teammates are and it would be a nice coop improvement when you're in voice chat with your fighter comrades to see what they are talking about or where they are.

Boss Fighters VR is a fantastic entry-level VR experience for many people to start getting more into VR gaming itself and how to learn the basic controls too. I had used an original Quest with Steam VR and, to be honest, the experience definitely could’ve been more enhanced graphically if I was using a different device and I believe that is where the issue comes along with the game.

As fun as the game is and as helpful as it can be to learn VR controls, the experience is gated behind a device that not many people have, and if they do, most sales are for the older Quest models, which may not have the experience to be as amazing as the team would want it to be. Not only that but there were times in the game where grabbing items for a duration of time was almost impossible, it became frustrating when picking up a car only for it to fall from your hands as soon as you got to the right position.

While playing, I had tried out a few different weapons but had fallen in love with two in specific and those were the laser and the spiked maul, being able to swing around with the maul and hitting a fighter to immediately kill them was satisfying but not as satisfying as having grabbed a fighter and lasering them to death. With an adaptive environment that can be broken and changed easily by the boss using their weapons and the tools in the town such as cars and signs, it was great fun being able to destroy the environment and get a bonus against the fighters being able to block different routes.

Once movement is grasped and understood, not only is it very easy to get a hand of fighters (haha) but it's very easy to spend a decent amount of time just destroying the arena, killing fighters, and unfortunately meeting doom at some points when becoming a bit too reckless. The game is quite fun and requires space to be able to play in a manner where you aren’t destroying lamps and fans but turn on your camera for others to view and it quickly turns into a blast of an experience with few bugs.

The VR experience is definitely not finalized and needs some work, but some of the issues definitely come from a lack of experience and a lack of equipment on my end to make sure that the experience is as wonderful as it can be. But even with all that being said, the game does a fantastic job of giving the player enough different weapons to spice up the experience as a Boss for games to come.

Review

Overall, Boss Fighters was very enjoyable, albeit some improvements to be done. In the current state of the game, with some of its improvements, I had a fantastic time, and the game managed to pique my interest. It had my adrenaline pumping in the chases and hide-and-seek moments of the game, and while playing over voice chat, it had us burst out in laughter when the boss managed to pick up/thor and laser me to death, not to mention the random jumps and debris thrown in my way that could easily crush me to death made for a fun spectacle.