When I told one of my Meta Quest owning friends that I was about to join the club with theQuest 3, their response was “Cool, we can play Gorilla Tag together!” This speaks to the lonely art ofvirtual reality. Not only does it have a smaller playerbase than consoles and a tougher time convincing people to take the leap, but most of the games are solitary affairs. You stand in your living room cut off from the world, and inhabit an empty (if impressive) digital world.Mannequinis looking to change that.
The asymmetrical 2v3 shooter is not just a multiplayer VR game, it is one built on teamwork and communication. That might put off some, with online shooter voice chats not always being the most pleasant of places, but VR tends to have a less toxic community due to the smaller, more committed buy-in. Across my time with Mannequin, I never encountered anything like my experience withValorantorCall of Duty. I did, however, end up crashing a lot of friend groups (few entourages roll five headsets deep), which is another thing to look out for.
The core premise of Mannequin is interesting, even if the lore is a little thin on the ground. Aliens (Mannequins) have landed, with the ability to freeze time. While frozen, they can also mimic the appearance of humans - aided by the fact that all the humans in the game are wearing biohazard suits in a featureless tech factory. you may play as these Mannequins, or as the Agents - a crew of humans whose aim is to kill the Mannequins, and who can move freely when time is frozen for reasons I can’t quite grasp. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a game, basically.
In each match, there are three points spread across the maps. For Agents, these points charge your laser weapons. For Aliens, they must each be destroyed to win. Killing all Agents is also a win condition. I say ‘all’, but I mean ‘both’, which is probably my biggest gripe with Mannequin - it should not be an asymmetrical shooter. There are three Mannequins aiming to destroy three points, and only two Agents to defend them. Add to the fact Mannequins blend in perfectly with the overcrowded rooms and just need to touch an Agent once to kill them, and it doesn’t feel particularly balanced.
If it must be asymmetrical, it feels like flipping the balance is a little closer to even. Right now it’s like Dead by Daylight if there were three Killers instead of one.
It’s difficult to move on from this bone of contention, as it has a major impact on each match. If it remains this way, I’m not sure there’s enough intrigue to the gameplay to keep players hooked. However, let’s park that for a moment and discuss what Mannequin does well. I’ve played a lot of VR shooters - the genre suits the medium well with its first person perspective - and Mannequin is one of the few that manages to feel different without overreliance on a gimmick.
Guns in Mannequin do three things - they shoot, they scan, and they fire a locator grenade. The latter uses several charges of the weapon but will pinpoint the location of the Mannequin, making it highly effective if used well. The scanner goes haywire when near a Mannequin, but the maps are so crowded with frozen humans (maybe a little too much), that this mostly just reveals when would be a good time for the grenade. Shooting meanwhile is simple and tactile, aiming with the controller movements and pulling the trigger. Shooting a human causes it to short circuit briefly, while Mannequins go down in one shot, going some way to rebalance the power dynamic.
As for playing as a Mannequin, the real strategy comes in whether you stick or twist. When frozen, you are near-undetectable as a Mannequin, and firing the grenade often gives enough time to make a clean getaway, though you’ll need to keep your wits if the Agents team up on you. However, you naturally can’t move when frozen, so you may’t hide forever. Being able to kill opponents with a single touch is a cool injection into the shooter genre, replacing aiming and cover with the bravery and speed to get in close.
The fact you’re thinking actively about your approach to Mannequin, rather than just competing for the fastest reflexes, makes it one of the more interesting shooters in the VR space. While its vision of tactical play doesn’t always work in the 2v3 format with a mix of friends and strangers, it deserves credit for trying to elevate the genre in VR. It would have been easier to make a worse game (but likely with fewer pain points) that took the freezing idea and made it yet another VR shooting gallery.
However, it does feel a little simplistic. Your only goal is to destroy three beacons, also done by touch, and there’s no way Agents can man them all. It may be that in development a 3v3 led to Agents camping around beacons, waiting for Mannequins rather than hunting them, but at the moment it feels as though Mannequins have less to do. The Rambo nature of most casual shooter players, which in my time reviewing the game is the majority of the playerbase (myself included), means getting the drop on Agents feels a little too easy even without the basic goals and the uneven team numbers.
The maps also initially feel simplistic, but after a few games this works to the game’s credit. A little like the fog in Silent Hill, it’s as if the limitations of the VR space have led to innovation. While the largely featureless blue and black maps of generic tech cubes don’t seem all that inspired, in practice they serve to disorient the player and tie into the feeling of hunting, or being hunted. With the lack of much story to support the gameplay, the maps do their best to bring the eerie mystery to the forefront by constantly making you second guess which path you took. There probably is a higher budget version of this game where the maps bring narrative and personality, but as is, they do their job well.
Despite some teething problems with the perfect vision of how the game is meant to be played meshing with the actual execution amongst players, Mannequin is an inventively strategic game that offers positive momentum for shooters in the VR space. I expect patches to further address the balance and maybe give the game a bit of depth, but fresh out of early access, it’s a solid addition to the Meta Quest library.
