Marvel’s Deadpool VR
I’ve owned exactly one VR headset in my entire life, and it was the original PlayStation VR, gifted by my younger brother for my birthday. I browsed the games available on the platform, and the only thing that seemed even remotely worth playing was Beat Saber, which was fun until I realised I’d have to pay to add songs I actually wanted to listen to. I set it aside after a month or two, where it collected dust in my bedroom, never to be touched again.
VR Games Have Come Quite A Way, But Maybe Not Far Enough
But virtual reality games have come a long way since then. We got the critically acclaimed Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, the excellent and equally-beloved Tetris Effect in 2018, and last year’s Batman: Arkham Shadow, which won several awards. We’re increasingly seeing established franchises dabble in VR offshoots – Metro Awakening, Horizon: Call of the Mountain, and The Dark Pictures: Switchback – while still others adapt their existing games to the platform, like with Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, Hitman, and Among Us VR.
Still, none of these games have looked so good that they earned more than a half-hearted shrug out of me, let alone a temptation to shell out hundreds of dollars for a headset. A Meta Quest 3 would cost more than a month of rent! In this economy? Sure, I’m missing out on cutting-edge tech and a platform full of games of which some are actually good now, but there hasn’t been anything that’s wowed me enough to take the plunge.
That’s until I saw Deadpool VR at last week’s Summer Games Fest. The antihero hasn’t had a video game focused solely on him since 2013, which to be fair, wasn’t that long ago.
That said, you also can’t play that game anymore, so if you haven’t already gotten a copy and played it, it pretty much doesn’t exist. Game preservation really is in the pits, huh?
I’m not a Deadpool fan by any stretch of the imagination – I’ve always been most interested in the X-Men, out of all of Marvel’s characters – so getting to play as the dude doesn’t immediately grab my attention. However, the Borderlands-y cel-shaded graphics, creative ways to murder enemies, and sardonic sense of humour certainly did.
Lots of VR games have combat in this vein, but rarely do they look so fun, and it feels like the platform was made for games exactly like this – frenetic, brutal, and bloody. I very much want to hold a fascist’s face to a spinning blade and repeatedly smash some old guy’s head into a table. That it features a character rarely spotlighted in video games is just a plus.
If Deadpool VR Isn’t Funny, It’s A Flop
But as we’ve seen with other games – High On Life, anyone? – a game that relies on irreverent, sardonic humour can easily fall flat. The other Deadpool game had critics split on its humour, either saying its fourth-wall breaking and humour worked, or that the jokes fell flat as part of a wider, significantly flawed title. Deadpool is already hard to pull off, considering his specific brand of humour. It can even get grating if you don’t gel with it. How will it feel to play a whole video game with his voice in your ear?
Speaking of voices, it feels like Neil Patrick Harris is doing a Ryan Reynolds voice, and it’s kinda weird.
Deadpool in VR, beyond making it feel good to play the antihero, will have to make sure the humour lands, and that’s going to be difficult. If it’s laugh out loud funny, Deadpool VR will probably be a winner. But if it turns out to be more like High On Life, well… that game just had a sequel announced, so I guess it’s not all bad.
