A Tactical Early Access Mixed Reality Gem

Table Troopers is what mixed reality gaming on your Quest should be all about: compelling, accessible, intuitive, full of potential, and fun.

It screams “Worms,” as in, the tactical strategy game series you’ll recall if you grew up with a PC in the mid-90s or played the many sequels that have since followed. But it innovates on the mold, and there’s room for much more. It’s a perfect complement to your library of games to play against millennials or Gen Alphas, against VR rookies or vets: you won’t need to “go easy” for everyone to have fun.

Core Gameplay: Multiplayer Tactics

You could keep it simple: blow up everyone on the other team.

And Table Troopers’ default multiplayer settings equip you for that: each player starts with a robust suite of weapons including powerful bazookas and explosives; item boxes randomly pepper the battlefield between turns promising a chance to shift the tides.

But there’s joy in the nuance.

I’m not convinced the standard battle settings are optimal. In default mode you’ll start with enough power weapons, and you’ll collect enough more from impending loot boxes, that there’s seldom any need to experiment with pistols or shotguns. Where guns might *barely* miss or suffer from short range, or where grenades might bounce erratically, the bazooka fires straight and explodes on impact, feeling highly overpowered as a result.

I’m finding alternative game types more rewarding. One option limits your starting inventory to just pistols & fish (naturally, your melee weapon is an oversized fish), shifting the risk/reward profile of item boxes. Alternatively, adjusting the loot drops to “health items only” results in a game where players need to be far more tactical about their scarce starting kit. But to each their own!

Turns rotate among players and within the remaining soldiers on each team. If you’re crafty, you can intuit when it’s safe to leave a soldier exposed, confident that it’ll be a few rounds before nearby enemies can attack.

Controls are fast and intuitively leverage the Quest’s motion sensors and main trigger and grip buttons.

Aiming & firing is where the gameplay shines brightest: like Worms, each weapon gives you a laser sightline, with some (like the sniper rifle) affording much greater accuracy. Table Troopers’ third dimension (over Worms’ 2D) affords greater control and more rewarding payoff: you can manipulate the entire board to your preferred line of sight, and you’ll contend with wind making each shot different from the last. It’s hard!

Solo Campaign

Table Troopers has a solo campaign if you haven’t got a mate with the game yet. I wish it didn’t commingle the tutorial into the campaign as an unskippable chapter 1, though making it into the real campaign presents a mix of challenges that tests my mettle: some classic bruisers where you’ve got to outgun the opponent, but others where figuring out the best tactical strategy wins the day.

You might need to grab a weapon and then hide until the CPU’s “next” player is a safe distance away; you might entirely avoid trying to blow up the CPU and use the extra energy on your turns to race around the map and pick up keys. These tactics aren’t obvious or laid out explicitly in each level’s instructions, which makes them thrilling when I uncover and deploy them successfully.

Table Troopers stands out as a delight to play across the room from a friend, in a way that few current VR titles can match. Sure, it’s briefly odd to see my counterpart’s avatar floating next to his actual headset-bearing body — no local co-op colocation yet — but then it’s doubly funny to watch both body & avatar throw their hands up in agony after a critical miss.

I reflect fondly on the moment my friend’s wife crossed the room and called, “Sorry! I don’t want to interrupt and get in the way!” Often a problem with VR, but in this case with MR, it’s a non-issue. We could see her coming a mile away; there were ample pauses in the action; there weren’t even any stray rug-colored LEGO pieces to accidentally step on.

Here, Table Troopers shines light on an ambitious, optimistic future: Oddly and ironically, despite a headset strapped to my face, my nose isn’t simply “buried” in my device. We all just enjoyed one another’s company while playing a digital tabletop-style game. And to boot: no matter how many explosions we set off in-game, there is no cleanup required!

Table Troopers Review – Current Verdict

Table Troopers will be a fun mixed reality title to watch blossom. More game types! More weapons! Characters with different attributes! Custom maps!? It’s a tactical tabletop joy on Quest 3 and there’s no need to wait. What’s here is already a joy out of the box today, so give it a spin. Bombs away!

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines. As a review-in-progress, this is currently unscored, and we’ll revisit this review at full release.