There you go, there’s your review, now bugger off so I can get back to mixing drinks. I’ve got a queue of Grondians standing three deep, and those Screaming Organisms aren’t going to make themselves. No? Not good enough for you? Very well, get to the back of the line, and I’ll see if I can mix you up something a little more to your liking, but I’m warning you, buddy… you better leave a tip.

CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!

Startenders is the VR debut from experienced indie developers Foggy Box Games. For their first foray into the medium, the team have created an all-new spin on the niche market of time management gaming. Offering an arcade-style bartending experience set in a world beyond the stars, Startenders is unlike anything yet seen on the Quest.

The game sees the player embody an inadvertently kidnapped earthling who has been beamed aboard a galactic bar ship due to an unfortunate clerical error. Aboard this ship, you will meet your robotic companion RILEE and reluctantly begin your new life as an Academy bartender…or rather, Startender. With a brief tutorial under your belt, you’ll be ready to get behind the bar start washing, pouring and shaking your way into the folklore of cosmic inebriation.

Early in the game, you encounter a nameless hacker bent on breaking you out and returning you to Earth, provided you buy pieces of the machine needed to teleport you home. Continuing as a Startender, you work shifts at various intergalactic bars. All the while, you’re hoping to earn enough to complete the task and earn yourself a one-way ticket back home.

Like almost everything else in Startenders, the story is well delivered, well suited to the game’s character, and gives a nice sense of depth and polish that supports the core mechanics. Do you really need the story to enjoy the gameplay? Nope. Does it detract from the experience in any way? Absolutely not.

SOMEWHERE TO SLEEP IT OFF       

You begin the game in a Hub that contains so much more of this polish that it deserves its own honourable mention.

In most similar games, you would start in an area that gives you access to a rudimentary UI system designed to get you into the game quickly. Not Startenders. The game’s hub area has so many little features and such thoughtful design that it endears you to the game world in a truly commendable way.

From checking the ingredients list at the bar shop to upgrading your equipment at the interactive crafting stations, every element in Startenders is delivered with VR at the forefront of its design. Where other games would have you press a button, Startenders will almost always default to using a physical action. For example, all of your equipment is upgradable, but rather than just clicking on an ‘upgrade’ button in a menu, Startenders has you head over to a crafting station and weld the pieces of your new gadget together. These seemingly innocuous design choices make the game an outstandingly immersive experience.

There are also a series of mini-games that not only allow you to kill time but that are primarily geared towards improving the essential skills that you need to get good at the game. Anyone who has ever worked a cocktail bar will tell you that being good isn’t having fast hands but rather having a great memory. There are mini-games throughout the hub designed to help you memorise the recipes for each of the game’s fantastic cocktails. This means that rather than having to work from the visual cues every time, you can see orders and just get busy making them by heart.

It’s a fantastic touch, and for people who go deep down the Startenders rabbit hole, these mini-games will become essential training. 

PANGALACTIC GARGLEBLASTERS

Once you’re ready to begin your career in interstellar hospitality, you find yourself behind a bar in a bustling space cantina. Customers will approach the bar and when you’re ready to serve them, just give them a thumbs-up. Their order will appear above their head, both by name and via a visual representation of the recipe.

You need to use various devices to process the increasingly complicated orders your patrons will demand of you. These range from glass washers and juicers to garnish slicers and even a machine that allows you to set a drink on fire for that extra special flourish.

You have a range of taps to pour from, various fizzy mixers and an entire wall of spirits at your disposal; each is clearly labelled and easily identifiable at a glance. There is also a selection of alien-looking fruits and slightly more interesting items like anti-matter cubes that will repel everything they get close to until prepared correctly. There’s even a weird little bug creature that you have to feed a specific fruit to before squeezing it out into a drink.

In addition to the classic gaming metric of scoring you on how quickly you prepare drinks, there is also a Flare Metre that allows you to earn tips by impressing your clientele. Performing moves like throwing your bottles around, high pouring, double-handed pouring, and shaking cocktails will impress punters, and they’ll pay extra for style. It’s an excellent addition to the basic gameplay. It adds a whole extra layer of skills to master and really sells the sense of serving in a busy bar.

GLASS HALF FULL

As with all good things, there could always be better. The only criticisms one can reasonably level at Startenders stem not from what the game does but what it does not. The greatest missed opportunity in the game is the lack of levels with competitive leaderboards upon which to compete. 

While daily challenges are available, these are frozen moments in time, and the omission of score-chasing is a weakness for a genre game. The ability to challenge yourself against your previous best and compete for a vaunted space on the scoreboard is one of the main driving factors that keeps people coming back for more. I worry that without this feature, Startenders shelf life might become considerably less than it should be.

The second missed opportunity comes in the lack of any multiplayer options. The core mechanics of Startenders just naturally lends it to multiplayer. A slightly expanded bar with perhaps one or two additional machines and recipes, and I could see gamers putting on a show flamboyant enough to make Tome cruise and Bryan Brown jealous.

By the same token, a head-to-head mode where competing Startenders try to outdo each other performing against the same orders would have been genuinely addictive. Unfortunately, the latter seems technically out of reach at the moment, so we will all have to accept that for now, we will be left slinging suds solo.

THE VOMIT COMET

In addition to the classic “shift” mode and daily challenge mode, there is also the really excellent addition of the Free Mix mode. Free Mix mode lets players try their hands as interstellar mixologists, using the full range of ingredients to create their own cosmic creations. These are then “priced” based on their complexity, named by the player, and can then be ordered by customers in the main game. It’s an absolutely excellent touch, and it is thoroughly enjoyable to see customers ordering the bizarre concoctions that you’ve created and named.

This lets you utilise some of the wackier secret ingredients the developers have snuck into the game. A little experimentation leads you to discover, for example, that you can actually make yourself vomit. If you so choose, you can even use the vomit as an ingredient in one of your creations. Little touches like this make Startenders a wonderful celebration of perfectly developed character and functionality.

In fact, absolutely everything in Startenders just works fantastically. The physics are brilliantly executed, lending a sense of weight and presence to the world. The mechanics are fun and intuitive, and the design of each item and how it is used is both creative and thoughtfully delivered. 

In short, when it comes to the niche of time management games, Startenders is an absolute masterclass in what makes the genre enjoyable. 

IT’S YOUR ROUND     

Graphically, Startenders is exactly on point. With a clean and crisp cartoon-like visual style, the game offers an overall aesthetic that is as endearing as it is engaging. Everything looks beautiful, is easily identifiable and just reeks of character. The art design is top-notch throughout and perfect for the environment that Foggy Box Games have created.

The visual language that the game communicates with is perfect. Recipes are easily identifiable, products are clearly and distinctly labelled, and visual cues to tell you if you’ve succeeded at your task are easy to distinguish. The ingredients are quirky and full of character, and the drinks you produce look genuinely appealing.

The audio is just as well matched. The sound effects perfectly deliver the ambience of a busy shift behind the bar. Machines whizz and whirr, crowds bustle and grumble, and bottle tops pop with convincing energy. The voice acting is very well delivered, including a cameo from VR YouTube sweetheart Cas (from Cas and Charry). 

I will say that Startenders could have used a few more iterations of the customer banter, as those lines do get a little stale after a while. I would also have loved to hear the customers actually order their drinks by name, as this would have made the process even quicker for those who take the time to learn the recipes by heart. But these are very, very minor gripes.  

ONE FOR THE ROAD

Startenders is an absolute joy to play and is impeccably well designed and delivered on every metric worth mentioning. As an enthusiast of the genre, I can unequivocally recommend it as the best in class currently available on the Quest. Offering about 3 hours’ worth of gameplay to complete the story campaign but a virtually endless loop of intoxicatingly fun gameplay after that, there are countless hours of enjoyment waiting behind these bars.

A usual review for a time management game would come with the caveat that only gamers who appreciate the niche will find it of value. However, Startenders is so well made that it transcends genre preference. It has something to offer for just about everyone. In fact, it feels like the most appropriate way to finish this review is exactly as it began – 

Startenders is brilliant.

It’s important to be clear at the beginning, Lost Recipes is not a game. Or at least, I bloody well hope not. 

When viewed as an “experience” instead of a “game”, this review can be quite positive, but make no mistake – If you are looking for a cooking game, move along. This is not that. Had the team at 6DOF Reviews decided to judge Lost Recipe against our gaming criteria, holding its merit against other offers within that genre, Schell Games’ latest creation would definitely not have fared well…

ORDERING OFF MENU

Lost Recipes is categorised in the Oculus Store as an ‘app’ yet described on its store page as a cooking game. Under its announcement trailer on the official Meta Quest YouTube channel, it’s described as a “cooking simulator” at the start of a paragraph that itself concludes by calling it a game. To say that its marketing is muddled is an understatement.

A reasonably brief time within the world of Lost Recipes reveals that what you actually have here is a virtual cooking experience, with a side of homage to oral tradition. Unlike a genuinely gamified cooking offering, Lost Recipes features neither the frantic energy of service nor the compulsions of score-chasing, both of which nest traditional cooking games firmly within the genre of Time Management games. 

Instead, Lost Recipes guides the player through several recipes in an authentic, interactive historical kitchen while picking up a few info-taining facts about the local culture along the way. It is thoughtfully delivered, and once you get past the disappointment of not being in a cooking game, really quite enjoyable to be a part of. 

Lost Recipes allows the player to serve dishes from three different kitchens from three cultures throughout history; Mayan, Chinese, and Greek. You will be greeted by an authentically voiced ghost in each kitchen. This ghost will verbally walk you through the steps needed to recreate favoured or culturally significant dishes. While there is also a visual aid, in the form of a floating cookbook, the actual experience seems centred around the art of verbally handing down things of cultural significance, such as recipes.

Listen carefully to your ghost and follow your instructions closely, and you pretty much can’t go wrong.

LET ME SEE THOSE TONGS

Lost Recipes is incredibly well produced. The core mechanics that allow you to bring your long-dead cuisine to life are absolutely excellent. The kitchen operates with an understated physics system that only seems impressive when past experiences have shown you how complex natural-seeming physics in a kitchen environment are to achieve. To players without that reference point, everything just moves as effortlessly as it should, and it’s all remarkably intuitive.

Chopping, grabbing, and pouring are detailed and accurate and allow the player to shed the usual cognitive load and just listen to the instructions and enjoy the process. Ironically, this refined delivery is also the most frustrating element of the Lost Recipes experience. It highlights that although this is not a game (it’s really NOT), it would be outstanding if it were.

The raw potential for a fast-paced, high-pressure game with these mechanics is stark. Calmly making someone’s dead grandma their favourite pork dish is lovely, but I was hoping to be in an ancient Chinese restaurant prepping and serving Dongpo Pork against the clock. Please Schell Games? PLEEEEEEAAASSE?

PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING

Lost recipes is exactly as one would expect from a studio as accomplished as Schell Games. The visual style is bright and easy to interpret. The world occupies enough hyperbole to be accessible yet provides enough realism to make the experience land. The visual language, particularly across the ingredients, is convincing, and items move and interact as you would expect them to. The kitchen and environments seem authentic to the period and culture they represent. I am not a scholar in ancient cuisine, though, so take that with an appropriate pinch of salt, I guess.

The visual cues that indicate that a component is correctly prepared are easy to identify, making it easy to understand if you have achieved what is being asked. However, this is almost too efficient as following the glowing, golden indicators makes it very difficult to get anything wrong.

As with previous Schell Games offerings like the superb I Expect You To Die Games, the audio is exceptionally well delivered and forms an integral part of the experience. The ambient sounds and background music feel regionally appropriate and add to your sense of presence within the world. More importantly, they do very little to intrude on the player’s experience, focusing instead on the conversation between student and cooking instructor.

The voice acting is well directed, with voice actors indigenous to the regions they represent. Each performance is admirably directed to be easily understandable yet immediately recognisable as authentic to each region. The ghost voices brought a sense of genuine warmth to the kitchen, which I found both engaging and endearing.   

MAKE MINE A SUPERSIZE??

Whilst Lost Recipes does many things well, particularly when removed from the context and standards of a game, it lacks enough content to really achieve its broader aims. Developers Schell Games have indicated that they want Lost Recipes to be viewed as educational. However, they miss the mark somewhat and land in the realm of light infotainment. The anecdotal style of passing information to the player is natural and engaging, but there doesn’t seem to be enough depth in the imparted knowledge to truly call the experience educational. 

The other aim seems to be creating a calm, relaxing experience within which players can find small moments of zen. However, these moments are often too brief. Each cuisine/culture has only three dishes to prepare, most of which take around 6-7 minutes to prepare. There are indeed a few more robust dishes that will take about 15 minutes or so, but overall my experience indicates that a complete play-through would take no more than 1.5 – 2 hours. 

Each dish you prepare is graded on a five-star scale, but I found it easy to score four stars on every dish without much effort. With incredibly forgiving mechanics, a lack of distractions, a clear vis with a friendly ghost, and obvious visual cues, it’s almost impossible to make a mistake here. Unfortunately, this also suggests very little motivation to come back and try and improve on your first scores.

CHECK PLEASE

When viewed as an experience instead of a game, Lost Recipes is a quaintly charming offer, offering a relaxing and simple way to pass an hour or two. It provides the chance to feel enveloped within a warm and inviting historical context, albeit superficially.

But please, heed this warning. If you are looking for a fast-paced, fully developed, kitchen based time management game, then Lost Recipes will sorely disappoint.

For my sins, I spent over a decade in the hospitality industry. Among the cavalcade of mind-numbing servitude which marked my time, my stint as a pizza chef/grill cook was among my favourites periods.

Call me a weirdo, but there is a particular zen that can be found somewhere within the chaos of a busy commercial kitchen. Almost achieving flow state, there’s a rhythm that becomes hypnotic, right up until it gets too hot or you are reminded of the fact that the general dining public is made up of monsters. 

Now, thanks to FlatHill Games‘ Clash of Chefs, you too can experience the zen-like mastery of the culinary arts, all without the heat, the annoying customers or the ever so slightly unhinged Head Chef throwing plates across the kitchen. 

Although, to be fair, that last part would actually be pretty cool in a game. 

Out of the Frying Pan and onto the Quest

The little story at the beginning of this review wasn’t intended as a self-serving getting-to-know-you session for yours truly, but rather give context to the tone of this review. I am a big fan of cooking games and have been eagerly awaiting Clash of Chefs. It’s a genre that fails to resonate with a LOT of gamers, but for a certain few, there is a joy to be found that rivals a good rhythm game. That said, I am aware that time management games are a niche proposition, so I’ll try to be as objective as possible…

Clash of Chefs VR is as straightforward in its concept as a cooking game can be. The player embodies a floating set of hands positioned in a busy kitchen, surrounded by all the ingredients and equipment needed to create a range of meals and side dishes. As customers enter your restaurant, orders will appear on your display, introducing new dishes and components as the pace and complexity increase. The longer it takes you to complete an order, the lower your score, so advance preparation is key. However, leave a dish out for too long, and it will spoil or go cold, and you’ll have to start all over again.

There are four different kitchens for you to master, which will see you pumping out anything from a burger and fries to sushi and green tea. Each kitchen has its own set of mechanics, which require the player to settle into a different rhythm and give some much-needed variety to the gameplay. Grills need to be managed, salad items need to be chopped, and drinks must be poured. No individual task will trip you up with its complexity, but the challenge comes from balancing all tasks without slowing down.

Some of the later cuisines feel less designed around engaging mechanics and motions and more around padding the gameplay out a little. Things become less about cooking and more about stacking, which was my main complaint with the much-praised Cook-Out. In the end, the American kitchen is the only one that feels properly balanced, leaving the other cuisines feeling slightly undercooked.  

Bon Appetite

Clash of Chefs manages the basics of a cooking game very well. The layout of the kitchen makes sense, with everything feeling accessible and intuitive. The orders appear on screen in a clearly identifiable way which means that even when working quickly, it’s easy to distinguish the needed components. Grabbing and placing items feels just as it should, which is one of the most challenging aspects of the genre and is definitely a strong point in Clash of Chefs. Although I experienced one or two minimal issues, generally, you never have to worry about grabbing the wrong item or missing altogether, which allows you to play confidently at speed. 

The most noteworthy exception to this rule is the American kitchen fries, which caused me constant problems. Grab the handle slightly wrong, and the basket would reset in the fryer, making you slow down and grab again. Even worse is when you slightly misalign the basket and watch helplessly as your golden chunks of potato-y goodness disappear into an inexplicable void, giving you just enough time to stifle some profanity or another before starting again. 

While Clash of Chefs delivers the basics admirably, it, unfortunately, doesn’t bring much else to the table. While the genre is small, it is well enough developed that one could reasonably wish that the developers had infused their base mechanics with a little more creativity and flair. Games like All Hail the Cook-o-Tron introduce Boss Fights where your opponent can interfere with your kitchen by way of sabotaging your equipment or (my favourite) turning off your gravity so that your ingredients float all over the place. The outstanding Rags to Dishes offers an upgrade path for your equipment, allowing you to streamline your workflow and reduce the more annoying manual components. 

Sure, Clash of Chefs delivers the best fundamentals that the Quest has seen, but it doesn’t come even close to pushing the genre forward in any way. As in actual cooking, seasoning the basics with something unexpected and original can decide between good and great.

Order Up!

Clash of Chefs is not exactly visually spectacular, but it doesn’t really need to be. Each restaurant is delivered in a clear, cartoon-like fashion that is entirely functional but not quite breath-taking. The most important graphical element in any cooking game is how easily the visual language can be disseminated while moving at speed, and Clash of Chefs does that very well.

The combinations of ingredients required for any given order are clearly understood, as are the visual cues telling you if a component is ready, burnt, or spoiled. The only caveats to this functionally are a few minor animations that are a little jarring. Particularly noticeable is when ladles reset themselves and seem to skip a frame or two to find their way back to their appropriate resting place. 

Much like the simple cheeseburgers you’ll spend your time making, the graphics won’t blow your mind, but they get the job done.

The audio is, unfortunately, far more underwhelming, and serviceable feels a little generous here. There are auditory cues to indicate when certain components are complete or when a new order comes in. While they are helpful, they lack any real sense of character and are so innocuous that they often don’t register as you play.

The ambient music is broadly stereotyped towards the particular ethnic theme of the restaurant but does little to add tension or atmosphere, and there is a real missed opportunity here. Part of the thrill of the kitchen is the buzz; the sounds of a busy restaurant as diners, serving staff, sizzling grills and background music all compete for dominance. It’s an environment that should naturally lend itself to an exciting, atmospheric soundscape, and sadly the half-baked soundscape of Clash of Chefs does very little to urge you towards faster times and bigger scores.  

Back for Seconds

Clash of Chefs is a challenging game for which to gauge longevity. With four unique cuisines to master, each consisting of 20 levels of increasing difficulty, it’s fair to say that there’s some meat on the bones here. Each restaurant can be conquered in about an hour, so assuming you only play through the campaign, you have at least 3-4 hours on the plate right from the first course.

But, if, like myself, you find yourself particularly enjoying your time in Clash, then there is a lot more time on offer. With an endless mode that allows you to zone out and push out orders as long as you can and tantalising leader boards to tempt you back for seconds, there are hours of fun to be had here. 

That is, of course, if time management is your thing. If not, this game will just remind you of your worst part-time job in high school, and the whole affair will be over in short order. 

Clash of Chefs also launches with a PvP multiplayer mode which, for many, will be the icing on the proverbial cake. Chefs will battle in real-time to see who can speed through their orders the fastest, and although I was not able to get in a game during my pre-release access, I am looking forward to my first culinary showdown as the game goes live.

While the ability to compete with other chefs or with ghost runs of the leader boards top scorers is an excellent addition, I can’t help but feel that a trick is being missed here. One of the best elements of PvP gaming is the ability to directly impact your opponent, and this mode is just crying out for something a little more innovative than simply being the fastest. 

To date, no cooking game has integrated a truly combative culinary experience, and I fear that the current format will leave players hungry for more. 

Can I offer You a Digestive?

Clash of Chefs is an excellent addition to the Quest library insofar as it delivers the most intuitive and accessible cooking experience on the platform to date. For enthusiasts of the genre, it will fill a hole in the library that has been missing for some time and will undoubtedly become the gameplay equivalent of comfort food for many.

However, despite delivering all the essential elements of the genre admirably, Clash of Chefs misses the subtle nuance that this niche is capable of that could have seen it elevated from digital fast food to something extraordinary. With just a bit more innovation and attention to unique, rewarding mechanics, FlatHill Games could have earned their Michelin Star. Sadly, like most fast food, Clash of Chefs was tasty but left me hungry for more.

Done? Great. 

If not, I’ll have to assume you haven’t played OverCooked! (or for that matter, Overcooked! 2, the inevitable sequel) and need a bit more to go on. 

We Do This For Animals and Beasts

Cook-Out places you in a cook’s cabin in a fairy tale town. Creatures come over to your cabin and order increasingly complicated sandwich orders, and you have to prepare those orders on a carousel in the middle of your kitchen, and place them on the delivery platform when they’re ready. The compendium of creatures starts with mice, who ask for simple sandwiches and are pretty easy to please, and soon includes, among others, werewolves whose orders suit their enormous appetites, and cats who aren’t tolerant to any mistakes. You also have rabbits who are always in a rush, and never give you quite enough time before they grow impatient and leave. You get the picture.

Chef, Meet Action. Action, Meet Rob-Bot

The gameplay is fast and frantic and consists mainly of looking at the order, picking up the required ingredients, chopping them up with your cleaver, and placing them in the correct order on the correctly numbered plate. In Overcooked!, orders were not assigned to specific dishes, and as long as a plate matched a requested order, you were good to go, so there was a little more room for turning a mistake into a happy accident, with all the zen of Bob Ross. Cook-Out is less forgiving in this respect. Like in Overcooked, you rarely have all the ingredients you need for the incoming orders. When playing alone, you have to rely on the help of at least one other cook, the Rob-Bot, who has ingredients you don’t and is happy to help, as long as you keep his battery charged by winding up his crank-shaft every couple of minutes. 

This Ain’t No Ordinary Kitchen

As you progress through the games’ fifty levels, nicely spread out over 18 towns, you earn some power-ups and get to upgrade your equipment. Some power-ups will instantly make any sandwich perfect. Another power-up will make time crawl for a while, allowing you to squeeze in an order or two before a cat or werewolf storms off in a rage. Some will sharpen your cleaver so that it takes one quick chop to prepare an ingredient. 

Later on in the game, you’ll also be tasked with grilling some ingredients as well as washing dishes. The game piles on the difficulty quite well, and soon you’ll find your cooking sessions are very, very hectic. 

The overall gameplay of Cook-Out is simple enough but very engaging, the graphics are fun and cartoony, and the sound effects work, the music is what you’d expect for the genre, zany and fast, but isn’t particularly memorable. 

Too Many Chefs Just Make It Better

Where the fun really, and I mean really, kicks in is in multiplayer. Cook-Out, like Overcooked! before it, revels in its multiplayer chaos. When played online, whether with friends or with strangers online, it’s a beautiful, hilarious, chaotic frenzy of cooperation. You’ll all be telling each other what’s needed next, what you’ll prepare, and what they need to prepare, congratulating yourselves when you do well, and trying to come up with strategies to coordinate yourselves better. It’s engaging, and it’s friendly, and it’s a joy to play. Also, people will squirt ketchup and mustard at you – get used to that! When played with your significant other (assuming they also have a Quest), well, let’s say it’ll test your relationship as you shout orders at each other, blame each other for any mistakes or delayed orders, and generally turn into the worst version of yourself. Did I say it was fun? It is!

Cook-Out For The Win

It’s hard to give Cook-Out much credit for originality unless somebody corrects me and informs me that it existed in some form or another before Overcooked! did, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great game. The unashamed SJW in me doesn’t like the fact that Cook-Out owes its existence to the work of Ghost Town Games Ltd., the original developers of Overcooked!, but the gamer in me almost doesn’t care. 

Cook-Out is the most multiplayer fun I’ve had on Quest, and I highly recommend it. It’s a family-friendly game that’s fun for all ages, and perfect to play both with strangers and with partners and friends. It’s challenging, offers a good load of variety, and massive replay value. It’s definitely making our list of top Quest games!

The Basics

In Job Simulator, you play as a human entering a simulated museum of what work was like before automation had taken over, or at least what the AI imagines human jobs to have been.  There are four jobs to choose from, including office worker, gourmet chef, convenience store clerk, and auto mechanic.  Once you select a job, you complete a series of tasks related to that job, using the Oculus Touch controllers to handle and interact with objects in the environment. 

Chef? Mechanic? You Do It All!

The environments are cleverly laid out, placing all necessary objects within convenient reach from wherever you are standing.  Stations in some of the environments have multiple selectable modes that will change the function of that station.  For example, in the gourmet chef stage, the refrigerator can be swapped with a pantry by the use of a lever, and the sink can be changed to a sandwich prep area.  This clever use of space gives a nice room-scale feel to the game, while not requiring a lot of space in which to play the game.  The flexibility can get somewhat annoying in later jobs, however, as the frequency in which these stations need to be changed increases, and there are many more options from which to choose.  The Auto Mechanic stage requires constant toggling of two different stations to make the required fixes to the cars the robotic characters bring to you.  However, the tasks that the game requires you to perform all revolve around the manipulation of objects in the environment and can sometimes start to become tedious late in each stage.

Gameplay

Using the Oculus Touch controllers to interact with the world behaves as expected and works exactly like handling objects in the Quest First Steps tutorial.  There are a few surprising interactions with some of the objects in the world, though.  Pulling the trigger button while holding a stapler shoots staples like a gun, and a copier can be used to copy any object in the area, not just images on paper.  However, throughout my playtime, I did encounter some instances of the controllers losing tracking, causing my virtual hands to float in midair in an unexpected position.  Even more jarring, at one point the headset itself seemed to lose its tracking, leaving me feeling like there was an earthquake, but a quick restart of the software solved that problem.

While the audio in the game is sparse, there is a good amount of well-voiced dialogue from the robot characters.  There is not much of a soundtrack to the game, but there are a few music CDs hidden in the world that can be popped into in-game CD players to listen to the original songs on them.  Not every joke in Job Simulator is a winner, but enough of the humor lands to enhance the enjoyability of the gameplay.  The jokes are mostly based around the world being a computer’s interpretation of the jobs humans used to perform, and this concept remains strong throughout the game. For example, many of the books and objects throughout the world contain readable cover texts that contain extra jokes for players that care to inspect them, and the interactions with some objects also tie into this concept, such as a computer whose only keys are ‘0’ and ‘1’.  These gags are delivered with a crisp, cartoony graphical style that pops on the Oculus Quest, and enhances the humor of the game, especially in its more slapstick moments.

Longevity

Once Job Simulator has been completed, there is a bit of replay value from some additional modifiers that change up the experience.  There is also an infinite score-based mode in Infinite Overtime mode, which changes some of the layouts of the game’s areas, and gives you a string of randomly generated objectives, tracking the number you complete.  Even with these modes, the replay potential is limited, but this game is perfect for friends and family new to VR, so Job Simulator will likely have some additional value as a “show off” game.

Last Words

Overall, Job Simulator is an enjoyable experience, but its brief length and somewhat low replay value limit its lasting appeal.  The humor mostly works and adds a lot of enjoyment to a game that mostly revolves around simple manipulation of in-game objects.  Despite its shortcomings, Job Simulator is a perfect game for the Oculus Quest’s launch, and, like Beat Saber or Racket: Nx, it’s a great pick-up-and-play experience for players new to virtual reality.