The first two minutes of Marvel’s Deadpool VR are the perfect encapsulation of the anti-hero power fantasy. You wake up in the body of the merc with a mouth sitting on the passenger’s seat of a truck. The driver is duct-taped almost from head to bottom, gripping onto the steering wheel, as his muffling constantly invades your left ear. Next to your seat is an open bag—extend your virtual reality hand inside, and you’ll grab random junk food items to stuff your virtual face with. All the while, Deadpool is constantly talking on the phone. Like the driver, you can’t move. You can only sit there, eat trash, and fiddle with trinkets around the dashboard until the game decides to let go and move to the next sequence.
This premature ejaculation of exposition is followed by a barrage of sex jokes, Gen-Z-fueled pop culture references, and fourth-wall-breaking comments about game development. Actor Neil Patrick Harris provides the delivery for every quip with the grace and enthusiasm of someone who was paid 200 bucks to do the whole thing. Rather than the inherent smug perviness of Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, here Harris sounds like he’s going through it and would rather be doing anything else with his precious time.
This virtual reality take on the Marvel character is also the epitome of what’s expected in the medium. You run around shooting and dismembering and exploding and kicking and stomping on goon after goon. The start-up screen gives you three options to adjust settings based on how well you can stomach moving around with a headset attached to your head. I went with the one that gave me the least restrictions and accessibility settings, and just rolled with it. I imagine that, for the uninitiated, it must feel like hell—you’re constantly moving your head in all directions, and movements include anything from wallrunning to sliding on the floor and jumping into the air to do a flying kick toward the nearest enemy.
Honestly? It feels good. Combat in Marvel’s Deadpool VR is as refreshing as the long sip of a radioactive green Baja Blast after downing 2,000 calories worth of trash when you’re stoned. Using the full extent of the myriad of actions at your disposal quickly becomes compulsive, as the game features a scoring system where “playing with style” rewards you with jukebox-esque animations at the end of each fight, and multipliers for money that can be spent on more weapons and outfits for Deadpool. Perhaps the most indicative element of this mechanic is the fact that you’re doing all of this to increase your viewership, as Deadpool’s actions are being streamed online. The more multipliers you get on screen, the more comments from faux devoted Twitch viewers you get next to them.
But the high-octane action is constantly interrupted by cutscenes. Skippable cutscenes, I should say. You’re constantly back on the passenger’s seat, surrounded by often unrecognizable Marvel characters, with no place to go. Exposition in games can be a curse, but in VR, it’s a different kind of torment. Standing still in place with my arms to my sides as characters talk about shit I don’t care about with almost the same level of enthusiasm that I have only makes me want to return to entertaining fake viewers—even when that means watching my eyes get covered in fake blood while I run around waiting for my amputated arm to slowly grow back in order to avoid a “game over” screen.
At first, I thought the MCU-ness of it all would be the main element that made Marvel’s Deadpool VR unbearable. After all, the tone isn’t that different from watching the movies, which isn’t exactly a surprise. While the comic book character’s whole sitch is basking in constant absurdity and being really fucking annoying to everyone around him, Marvel’s Deadpool VR is aimed exactly at the audience that’s been spoon-fed cinematic stunts, sanitized naughty jokes, and marketing-driven cameos for the past decade.
But the experience also caters to chronically online habits that seem to be ever harder to escape from. No matter how much I continue to write on the topic of the dangers of compromising parts of our lives, and ourselves, to algorithms that only want us to keep on moving our thumb up and keep on shortening our attention span until the only thing left to digest is advertisements, I can’t seem to break the habit. I might spend a few days pretending otherwise as I force myself to catch up on reading rather than looking at reels for the third time in the past hour, but sooner than later, I’m back on my phone again. Back looking at a screen that feeds me short-form clips I would have never searched for on my own volition, one that forces me to learn innocuous facts that I’ll likely forget the next day, and that exposes my brain to the same songs used in the same trends as everybody else as they try to win the algorithm race and get more fake numbers from increasingly fake people to maintain their daily dose of dopamine. I don’t need Deadpool or a VR headset wrapped around my head to know there isn’t much I can do but sit and watch as I eat trash long enough to earn the right to play fetch again.
Marvel’s Deadpool VR was developed by Twisted Pixel Games and published by Oculus Studios. It is available for Meta Quest 3.
