Following last year’s genuinely excellent Batman: Arkham Shadow, Meta is moving from DC to Marvel for this year’s big superhero VR game effort with Deadpool VR, the just-announced first-person action romp due out exclusively for Meta Quest 3 and 3S in late 2025. I got a chance to swing by one of Meta’s Bay Area campuses last week to don one of the wireless headsets and become the Merc With a Mouth in a 30-minute hands-on session, and I learned several things I wasn’t expecting from the first Deadpool video game since Activision’s mediocre attempt in 2013.
1) Neil Patrick Harris voices Deadpool
Perhaps you had the same thought I did as you watched the announcement trailer: “Gee, that Ryan Reynolds soundalike sure sounds an awful lot like Neil Patrick Harris.” And sure enough, it in fact is NPH himself, whose snark we’ve seen weaponized on film time and again going all the way back to When Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The one-time Doogie Howser M.D. isn’t shy about letting the f-bombs fly as Deadpool, and assuming Reynolds’s price tag was too high, Harris sounds like a solid substitute.
2) It’s being developed by Twisted Pixel
If that name sounds familiar to longtime Xbox fans in particular, it’s because the studio made its name with a string of absolute banger Xbox Live Arcade games in the Xbox 360 days: The Maw, ‘Splosion Man, Ms. ‘Splosion Man, Comic Jumper, etc. It even made one of the few legitimately great Kinect games: The Gunstringer. After a fairly brief and uneventful period where they were acquired by Microsoft and subsequently parted ways with Microsoft, Twisted Pixel was picked up by Meta in 2021 after they made one of the best early-gen VR games: the black-and-white horror thriller Wilson’s Heart.
So what does all of this have to do with Deadpool VR? Simple: Twisted Pixel has a long track record of delivering good – and comedic – smaller-scale games, making them a potentially great fit for bringing the Merc With a Mouth to life in VR.
3) Marvel not only didn’t hold Twisted Pixel back, they encouraged more violence
There’s some give and take with Marvel when it comes to getting studio approval on the developer’s craziest ideas, admitted executive producer Jody Coglianese, but she told me that if they say no to anything it’s more about the character than any gameplay actions. But she said Marvel pushed Twisted Pixel more than the other way around, playing builds and then leaving feedback like, “What if holding your controller at a certain angle with one of your swords equipped enabled ‘x’ action?” And then the developer would put that new move into the game.
And I experienced plenty of ultraviolence in my short hands-on time. For instance, did you know that you can use your own severed arm – yes, enemies can slice and dice you up too – to slap bad guys with? Just look down after a few moments and as a bonus, you can watch your new arm grow in your shoulder socket. At another point, I shoved one of my swords through an enemy’s head, only to have it slide down the sword as if it was meat on a skewer. The coup de grace? Flicking the Meta controller in my hand forward to launch the head off of the sword and at another foe. Speaking of heads…
4) You begin the game headless
The first thing you see when gameplay begins is your own headless body – which you can control – and an evil scientist who is looking to do experiments on your severed head while aboard a stolen S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. Simply steer your body over to the scientist, grab him by the back of the head, and repeatedly slam his head into the table, teeth flying every which way until he dies. Then pick up your head, reattach it to your body, and off you go.
This sets the tone for what kind of over-the-top violence to expect from Deadpool VR, and thought it took me a bit to get comfortable switching between sword-based (read: melee) combat and gun-based (read: ranged) combat, by the end of the demo I was having a blast and didn’t want it to end. As such, I feel good about saying…
5) It’s surprisingly fun to play in VR
This isn’t Batman, where the World’s Greatest Detective’s stealth and investigative work suit the more methodical movement of VR rather naturally. No, Deadpool is basically a ninja who also really really loves guns, and Deadpool VR seems to capture that fairly well so far. As an example, you can wall run and double jump, the latter of which might sound silly but in practice works pretty well – especially paired with sliding and being able to jump kick enemies in the face or even smash their heads in with your foot after you’ve downed them.
You’ll also acquire an experimental device that not only lets you grapple up to distant points – thus speeding up your traversal – but it also lets you grab targets and fling them towards you, at which point time slows down and gives you the chance to execute them in a hail of bullets or, as I preferred to do, take out both of Wade Wilson’s swords and slice their body up in several different ways.
Not having any tactile feedback in the controller definitely diminished the literal feel of using the swords, for sure (for the record, Twisted Pixel says they’re still tuning that specifically), but if it annoyed me – or an enemy was just too far away – I reached down to my thigh holsters and virtually took out Deadpool’s dual pistols, blasting away at bad guys with abandon.
Can this hold up over the course of the full campaign? I’m optimistic for now, as Twisted Pixel says there are secret levels, replayability features, appearances from characters like Flag Smasher, Mojo, Lady Deathstrike, and Omega Red, and locations to visit like the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrer I played on as well as Mojoworld and the Spirit of Xandar. There are also weapon upgrades like exploding bullets and swords that can be thrown and retrieved like boomerangs.
In short, Twisted Pixel says their design philosophy for Deadpool VR is “say yes to the player” when, for instance, I asked myself things like, “Can I slice an enemy clean in half starting at the groin and going up through the top of the head?” during my demo. “The game rewards you for experimenting,” said lead design manager Phil Therien.
Give Meta some credit: they are taking some big swings in the VR gaming space – unlike Sony, who seems content to let the PSVR 2 be an overpriced paperweight – and giving quality developers with solid track records a chance to build a game that casual and core gamers alike can get into. I haven’t played nearly enough of Deadpool VR to determine just how good it is yet, but it genuinely did surprise me with how fun this beloved character – who hasn’t been playable in a video game in over a decade – was to suit up as in VR.
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