Job Simulator’s enduring popularity is no coincidence: it is, after all, the quintessential virtual reality game. Spread across four impressively interactive occupations, you’ll turn your comically exaggerated hands to all kinds of amusing tasks, like cooking the books as an office worker and dealing with a robbery as a convenience store clerk. As with the original PSVR version, the gameplay feels chunky and responsive, and it’s made even more tactile thanks to the accuracy of the PSVR2 Sense Controllers.
The ongoing gag is that said “simulations” are being conducted by robots (depicted as 90s CRT monitors with expressive faces on their screens) in attempt to help them better understand the lives of humans. Of course, they haven’t quite grasped the concept of “work”, so while many of the activities will feel familiar, they’re pointed and chaotic, underlining the stupidity and tedium of it all. The title’s laugh out loud funny from beginning to end, and is a rare example of interactive comedy that’s genuinely funny.
The silliness of the premise is only enhanced by the slapstick nature of the gameplay; while the game is outrageously polished, it embraces some of the inherent scrappiness of virtual reality, and thus encourages you to make a bit of a mess. Each environment acts a small sandbox, and you can interact with pretty much everything you see – even when you’re not supposed to. While the PSVR original was quite claustrophobic, owing to the limitations of the hardware, full room-scale is used in this PSVR2 port to allow you a little more space to operate.
But while this greatly improves each activity, and the visuals are razor-sharp throughout, it’s worth pointing out that this is the same game you’ll likely already have played; a free upgrade and the Infinite Overtime update – which offers a never-ending checklist of randomly generated tasks – makes clocking-in for a second shift a lot more palatable, but there’s nothing new to see in this version if you’ve done it all before.
Of course, if you’re new to PSVR2, then this is pretty much essential: it’s not only an easy-going introduction into the world of virtual reality, but it’s also a hilarious game that executes on its ideas flawlessly.
