Expect Turbulence: ‘Gambit!’ Brings Four-Player Co-Op Mayhem to Meta Quest 2 Today

Your mission was supposed to be simple: infiltrate a heavily guarded train and take the gold and cash onboard back to your client for a handsome reward. But it doesn’t take long before the job goes incredibly wrong for your hapless crew of mercenaries, and you must annihilate anyone who stands in your way if you’re going to survive. You can join in on this chaotic FPS adventure in Gambit!, which is now available on Meta Quest 2 + Pro for $19.99 USD.

You can play as any of the masked members of the Sand Lizards gang—Frank, Cody, Udo, and Kevin—and complete the campaign either by yourself or with up to three other friends in co-op multiplayer. While they all have identical abilities, each character possesses a unique weapon that becomes available once you fill your Gun Fever bar with enough kills, such as Frank’s deadly chainsaw or Cody’s explosive bow. Your main arsenal, meanwhile, consists of a wide variety of guns that can be purchased and upgraded through money earned in the game.

Gambit! takes some of the learnings from XREAL’s previous VR game, Zero Caliber: Reloaded, and applies it to a wild, pre-apocalyptic setting filled with a ton of violence, cheeky expletive-laden humor, vandalism, and tough boss fights. To find out more about the game, we spoke to Game Director Theodore Reiker and Lead Designer Peter Gelencser.

Theodore Reiker: Well, this happened long before Peter or I arrived at XREAL—a group of young VR enthusiasts, excited by the possibilities of the early Oculus hardware, decided to get into game development. That was six years ago, and the studio's first game, A-Tech Cybernetic—a space horror FPS—was released the following year. The real breakthrough and success, however, came with Zero Caliber in 2018, a military FPS built around customizable weapon management that became a massive, platinum-seller hit among PC VR gamers. We came in a climate where the company's management, buoyed up by this success, started planning for the future and looking for the right people to build it.

There was no question that the development of Zero Caliber—the company's flagship product—would continue, but they also wanted to try something different. That's what Gambit! eventually became.

TR: We received the genre directly from the company: They wanted a story-driven, four-player co-op FPS game that would build heavily on the company’s strengths. So the weapon-centric world was therefore a requirement. [laughs]

Peter Gelencser: After several rounds of establishing core values and the framework of our game, we sat down and started having fun. Theo and I have this awesome nerdy cultural state of flow where one of us starts exploring a setting, the other compliments and fills the gaps—we come up with situations, conversations, cool-to-have bits and whatnot—and we end up with a loose layout of a game world we’d love to explore. Gambit! was born in a similar way. We came up with a kickoff for a setting and our four protagonists first, then just gave them convo kickoffs, and the rest happened mostly automatically. The main characters are children of chemistry: four kindred spirits in a badass, lethal amusement park of a universe with infinite coins and ammo. And then we throw them in the blender.

PG: I listen to a tremendous amount of music and have a collection of tracks that make me want to do the things you can do in the game—wave around as many guns as I can hold, say badass things, do badass things, scream mildly clever profanities, the lot. Then we showed that music to our lead composer and ended up with something we all liked.

The art is a melting pot of vaulting pioneer limitations, hardware surprises, jumping development gaps, and rummaging through mixed piles of LEGO sets. We were very limited in resources, but we wanted to make the best of it. I wish we had more, but I’m still happy with what we ended up with.

TR: To be brutally honest, not much [laughs]. As mentioned before, Gambit! was a separate development project and built by a different team in the company to avoid interference with the plans regarding Zero Caliber. Important know-how was shared across teams, of course. By the time Gambit! reached its alpha milestone, Zero Caliber: Reloaded was released in the Quest store—and a lot of important lessons were learned. We had a lot of help from the Zero Caliber team: For instance, gun handling wouldn't feel so natural and punchy without their invaluable advice, for which we’re eternally grateful.

PG: Four players can join up with identical abilities, save for the special weapons. The casual nature of combat and interactions called for a democratic approach in terms of abilities, but we still wanted to give an identity to each character. So we put a lot of effort into writing each character with a lot of love and care. They have unique reactions depending on the context and the event—from throwing the last grenade to getting wounded to comments regarding a fellow teammate’s death—and we also gave them fitting and distinctive special weapons.

None of the characters give you an advantage over the others, but each of them should be a lot of fun to use. Chainsaw, exploding arrows, the Palpatine-o-mat shock paddles, and the acid crossbow each look and feel like the weapons we pretended our sticks and household tools to be when we were kids in the ‘80s.

TR: We stick to the classical rules in our Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes: invite your mates and shoot each other to smithereens. We’re also excited about our Municipal Mayhem™ mode. It’s basically a tournament ladder players can climb against random opponents—a fast-paced battle royale or last-man standing mode where you can move up or down the ladder depending on your ranking. Of course, the higher rungs of the ladder offer mind-blowingly cool gifts: not just new skins or upgrade possibilities for your weapons, but even new masks.

PG: People seem to be really happy with the overall atmosphere and quality of the spoken dialogue, and I’m so happy to hear that. I believe that’s where we had the clearest and most unlimited influence over the game, and I’d like to think that’s where it shines the shiniest. I was also getting a load of smiles and laughs about the story, so that’s good to hear. And the music is great, too. The gameplay is also shaping up to be a lot of fun. There’s a lot to see, do, and discover.

TR: We’ve heard a lot of useful comments, advice, and opinions from testers and influencers. We’ve incorporated a lot of their feedback into the game—thank you very much!

PG: We had the most fun when we were really early in implementing co-op, a time when characters’ appendages were all over the place. Hands were flying like an Addams Family get-together, and since we have a very, shall I say, sophisticated gesture system, it was a load of fun to see everyone expressing themselves.

The Day of the Scaled-Up Firearms was also a great time: One of the builds, lord knows where or how, featured a bug turning all of our firearms into double-sized instruments of doom. Everything else worked as intended, but players were running around with an arsenal of gigantic SMGs, revolvers, and shotguns. To turn this into a feature, we’d have to fine-tune a bunch of other things we didn’t have the capacity for at the time. But given correct hand poses, collision meshes, and rigorous testing, I could totally see this as a fun Gambit! mod.

TR: We have more plans than anyone could handle within a reasonable timeframe, including the development team [laughs]. Obviously, our top priority is collecting and acting on community feedback, and adding more content. A new game mode called Consumer Cleanup™ will be our zombie mode with a twist, which will have a completely new campaign narrative—this should be released very close to the launch of the base game package. We’re also working on new weapon packs, third-party accessory support, and additional languages and localization. Our list is longer than you could imagine.

We’d like to support Gambit! with new content on a regular basis as long as there’s interest, and more importantly, for free. Players who place their trust in the initial launch package will receive all future add-ons and DLC packages for free.

PG: Have fun. Go everywhere. Try everything. Listen to the dialogue. We put a lot of love into writing the story and the interactions. Play it again. Get all the weapons, they’re super fun. It’s fast and spinny. But give it time, and you’ll get the hang of it, trust me.

TR: As noted by the train AI in the game, which is stolen by our unlikely heroes: “Expect turbulence!”

Grab a couple friends and blast through the zany world of Gambit! together on Meta Quest 2 + Pro.