Fourth Wall Break/Disclaimer: Kathryn Yu, current senior LA reviewer and former Executive Editor of this publication is, by day, a Senior Technical Gameplay Designer on Marvel's Deadpool VR. Given that everyone at NoPro works with Kathryn, there isn’t anyone on staff who wouldn’t have a connection. So it falls to your publisher and humble narrator to risk his compatriot’s ire and your trust as he tackles the biggest VR release of the season. She has no idea what I’m writing here, in fact you might be reading it before she does! Hey, while I’ve got your attention: use the On This Page thing to jump around to what you want to know about. Go ahead. No one is watching. Except Kathryn. She’s everywhere. IYKYK.
So what does multi-billion dollar franchise Canadian superstar Wade Wilson do between movies?
Why he stars in video games, of course, and Marvel's Deadpool VR is a very video game ass video game (non-derogatory).
In this single player romp Marvel’s Merc with a Mouth gets poolnapped to Mojoworld, an alien planet where ratings are king, the ruler Mojo has moved on from being a disgusting cable TV producer to being a disgusting streaming content producer, and Wade is promptly put to work acquiring other talents (read: doing some kidnapping of his own) from Marvel’s extensive roster of villains. Oh, and play in some very video game arena battles.
Plot wise there’s nothing too surprising going on — see that “video game ass video game (non-derogatory) line up in paragraph three — but if you’re into Deadpool the character there’s a lot to get your fanboy/girl/person parts tingling.
The Basics
The game starts you off on a very Marvel mission: taking down a Z-list bad guy (Flag-Smasher, but the one from the comics not the one from the Disney+ series) on a stolen S.H.E.I.L.D. Helicarrier. There you learn the basics: you’re gonna jump around, shoot guys, slash them, and toss explosives.
There’s more of that in every level, most especially with the first full level where you’re infiltrating the base of The Hand, the ninjas who usually fight Daredevil or Wolverine and who inspired The Foot Clan from The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fun fact: I knew of The Foot before I knew of The Hand, which has always made me think “The Hand” was a silly name for demon ninjas.
It’s in this level where the core gameplay loop proves to be a little thin: shooting, slashing and ‘sploding can only be so expressive when there’s not seemingly a lot of depth to the sword mechanics. At this point in the play though I was worried that we were in for some wash-rinse-repeat for six or more missions with little variety.
Luckily I was wrong. We’ll get there. But first let’s talk about our star…
Origin Story
As things go, I got introduced to Deadpool in the comics at a very weird time in his life. Long after his initial run in New Mutants and X-Force by his creators Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, and even after the legendary Joe Kelly run which did so much to define the character we know today.
At the time DP’s books were on the downslope, caught in an editorial wasteland, and he was in danger of being shuffled off from Marvel Comics entirely. Can you imagine the aggregate lost revenue if they had canceled DP in the early aughts? No T-shirts. No Funko Pops. No movie. No Welcome To Wrexham.
I wasn’t much of a Marvel guy, but somehow I saw a panel of the Spider-Man villain Rhino in a hamster ball — and that was enough for me to dive into the very strange era that was the cult favorite Deadpool/Agent X run by Gail Simone and the UDON art studio. After that run ended, I parted ways with the character until he emerged on the silver screen, embodied by Ryan Reynolds, who ascended the B-movie path to becoming Marvel Jesus, and adopted Welch cultural hero.
In so many ways Deadpool is that dirty little secret, the pop culture id that makes the sheer volume of BRANDED CONTENT that we swim in more tolerable by taking sometimes literal piss takes on everything. That DP is here, fully self-aware, and lives up to the Merc with a Mouth moniker by never shutting up. (Also non-derogatory.)
It’s The Writing, Stupid (And The Acting)
All that is a loquacious (look it up) way of saying that the writing and vocal performances are the stars of the show here. It doesn’t hurt that Joe Kelly is credited at the top of the writing team, and that if you had to cast someone other than Reynolds as Wade Wilson, there’s no choice better than Neil Patrick Harris to the point where I just might hear his voice when I pick up Batman/Deadpool later this week. Synergy!
There were lines so wicked my jaw literally dropped more than once. There’s also so many puerile sex jokes and so much toilet humor that you’d think the writers just spent an afternoon lurking in Gorilla Tag listening in on middle school boys who definitely shouldn’t be spending that much time in a headset when Robolox is right there on their mom’s iPad.
It’s glorious. If that’s your kind of thing. If I wasn’t playing this for review — which means jamming as hard as you can through mission after arena and still managing to miss the embargo drop by half a day because the headset doesn’t hold that long of a charge and you aren’t 16 anymore in any sense of the word.
Wait… where was I? Oh yes.
Deadpool. Marvel's Deadpool. VR.
Playing The Part
One of my favorite things in VR games, distinct from regular video games, is getting to act out the cut scenes.
Hear me out: while NPH is rapid fire spouting the banter whipped up by the writing team I found myself pantomiming along, embodying the character. I’m not sure if other people do this — if you’re like me, let me know, we’re forming a club — but I don’t even make a conscious choice to do this. I just start playing along. There’s ample opportunities for this exact kind of shenanigan in the hub area between missions and arena battles, and the time we get there adds some depth to Wade’s relationships with the two main supporting characters: Spiral and Major Domo.
The surly Spiral and the affable Domo both make for great foils for DP’s sense of humor, and there’s even a button you can push in the hub to get a video call with Mojo, the vile big bad of the game who really lives up to being gross in every sense of the word. Voiced by the one and only John Leguizamo, Mojo manages to have real charisma in a twisted way. (The entire cast, down to the “Additional Voices” is stacked, by the way.)
The constant banter with the characters — there’s almost always someone, usually Spiral, playing “the person in the chair” guiding us through the adventure — wound up giving added dimensions to Deadpool the, uh, man. I’ve never thought of Wade as being a particularly lonely person, but in his desperate attempts to win Spiral, who hates his guts, over I started to get a sense that all of the endless chattering was a broken way of trying to find connection in the world. Only it’s exactly the thing that would keep almost anyone at bay.
Broader Than Deep: The Gameplay
Remember like three sections ago when I said I was wrong to worry about a wash-rinse-repeat set of gameplay? Let’s break it down:
For starters, over the course of the main missions the cycle gets a bit smoother as more weapon options unlock. Creative kills unlock the ability to purchase more weapons, and those feed into getting more Mojobucks.
Unfortunately, I found the expressiveness to mostly be tied to weapon usage and in the mission chapters the relatively occasional environmental kill. But as the game went on the bucks started flowing a bit more and I got a feel for switching between guns, swords, jump kicks, and explosives to create a rhythm of my own. Even if a lot of the swordplay just wound up being spin the blades around like RR does in the bad Wolverine movie.
Maybe there’s more to the swordplay, but I didn’t find it. In some ways it makes sense: Deadpool himself isn’t the best he is at what he does, he’s just unkillable and willing to do whatever it takes. That “whatever it takes” really comes through in the game’s breadth.
The first real taste of that comes with the “super” weapons, which become usable after a kill-meter fills up in a given combat. Using them gets you more cash, which really jumpstarts the virtuous circle on the game’s load out system. On Normal difficulty, which is what I played on, the supers do a pretty good job of closing out a given brawl. The Gambit-style card deck and the faux Mjölnir are particularly fun to use.
Boss battles rely on quick time events to give some variety to the combo of shoot/slash/‘splode/grapple. Some boss encounters even step entirely outside the game’s core dynamic and offer up sequences that feel ripped from other games. This being Deadpool, that doesn’t remain unremarked on. These are some of the best sequences in the whole kit and caboodle.
This being an adventure game there’s also some light puzzling, which once or twice nearly stumped me. For the most part the trick to these is slowing down and trying to feel your way through them. These tack entirely against the game’s otherwise kinetic and chaotic play style. To be honest: I’m not sure what I think of that, and there’s one in particular I was nearly totally stumped by until I leaned into the “slow down” thing.
The other place I found breadth was in the arena stages that happen after every mission stage once you’re on Mojoworld. Here the designers get to try out a whole lot of game styles, some of which I could see myself playing for hours on end, others which couldn’t end soon enough. Each arena had three phases, one of which inevitably teamed you up with a Deadpool variant against opponents, with every mini game using the same map but entirely different rules.
Not that the arenas were without some bumps: at least once I found myself wishing I could skip the game type, but managed to find the trick to making it work. Good thing I did or this review would never have gotten written! Unless you hate this review in which case: HA! On a less compressed time schedule, I’d probably find the difficulty of some of the later arena fights a feature and not a bug. Review runs can distort perception. Given that we only encounter each game type once on a story run, things might be different when I jump back in and take advantage of the fact that the game lets you revisit any level.
One thing I definitely found myself wishing was that I could play these mini-games with and against real people.
Could We Bring Some Friends To Mojoworld, Please?
I don’t know what the roadmap is for the game, if there’s DLC or something else being cooked up. (No, really, I’ve got zero insight here despite the disclaimer way up above.)
What I do know is that it would be a crying shame for the arenas and game types made for this Deadpool VR to go unused for human v. human multiplayer. There are some bangers in here — I particularly loved “Sportsball,” and some of the death match types felt like I was back in the best of Halo’s multiplayer. Given how many hours I’ve sunk into Halo’s multiplayer across that franchise, there’s almost no higher praise I can give.
If this is remotely in the cards, deal me in.
One Left In The Chamber: Final Thoughts
Like the game’s star, Marvel's Deadpool VR grew on me. (I might need to consult a physician if the condition persists.) Unlike its star the game truly understands its mission: deliver a Deadpool that hasn’t been cut with baby powder but instead brings the whole of the chaotic Canadian’s take on pop-culture into focus and then bleed that into games as well.
The team at Twisted Pixel and the contributing studios — so many, many people — should be proud of the monstrosity they’ve wrought, taking players into the far corners of the Marvel sandbox while anchoring it all to the unlikely meta-megastar of the meta-franchise. While Deadpool VR isn’t reimagining what VR games can be, it delivers on its promise of being a fully fledge Deadpool adventure in VR, and a worthy addition to the line-up of first person adventure games on a platform that is really good at them and can always use more.
Deadpool VR launches on the Meta Quest 3/3S on November 28th. It will cost $49.99.
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord! You can also GIFT memberships.
In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.
Discussion