The Last Worker (Meta Quest 2, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, £15.99)
Referee: surrender
Just imagine, for one crazy minute, an international online store isolating its workers in warehouses and asking them to deliver parcel after parcel after parcel with little rest.
Well, imagine no longer! This new game, The Last Worker, presents such an improbable dystopia. You play as Kurt, who is, as the title suggests, the last human operator of a megalithic corporation called Jüngle – all of your former colleagues have long since been replaced by flying robots.
The game starts by having you perform Kurt’s day job. Accompanied by the smallest and most talkative of robots (he’s wonderfully voiced, in a Gordie accent, by movie and TV star Jason Isaacs), you pick up packages, deliver the good, and recycle the bad. You deliver, you recycle. You’re delivering, recycling… until a group of activists intrudes on your job and your life suddenly becomes, well, more busy.
In The Last Worker, you play Kurt, who is, as the title suggests, the last human worker in a megalithic corporation called Jüngle – all of your former colleagues have long since been replaced by flying robots.
The game starts by having you perform Kurt’s day job. Accompanied by the smallest and most talkative of robots (exquisitely voiced, with a Geordie accent, by movie and TV star Jason Isaacs), they pick up packages, deliver good packages, and recycle bad packages.
The gameplay has a game of … I can only say … solidity to it. You really feel as if you are occupying Kurt’s body. Thus, you really feel what it does. This means The Last Worker is a great VR experience on the new PSVR2 headset, though it can be played in standard reality as well.
But, really, everything else is what sets The Last Worker apart. Its muscular satire. They are moments of well-earned emotion. Her distinctive and colorful look, created by a veteran of the Judge Dredd comics. Fill me a copy now. And don’t slack.
Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom (Meta Quest 2, Pico 4, £24.99)
Verdict: presumptive offense
evaluation: 
Well, if it wasn’t Tommy Shelby himself. Flat-headed Lord of Birmingham. The Midlands Prince of Crime. Let me buy you a drink, Squire, and we’ll figure out how to get some decent loot… Oh, who am I kidding? Unlike everyone else in the country, I hadn’t actually watched Peaky Blinders, the show that seems to have made folk anti-heroes for Shelby and his fictional gang of the 1920s.
So maybe I’m at a disadvantage for this new virtual reality game, The King’s Ransom, set in the Peakyverse – or maybe I can see it for what it is, more clearly than anyone whose mind is bursting with imaginative devotion. who do you know
Anyway, this sounds like a perfectly adequate VR game to me. No more, no less.
Well, if it wasn’t Tommy Shelby himself. Flat-headed Lord of Birmingham. The Midlands Prince of Crime. Let me buy you a drink, and we’ll figure out how to get some decent loot
Unlike everyone else in the country, I haven’t actually watched Peaky Blinders, the show that seems to have made folk anti-heroes for Shelby and his fictional gang of the 1920s.
Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom strikes me as a perfectly proper VR game. No more, no less
It begins with Shelby recruiting your character to retrieve a briefcase containing details of British secret agents, stolen from none other than Winston Churchill before the war. Because even squatters like you care about king and country, right?
What follows is about two or three hours of wandering through period environments, occasionally fiddling with items to complete straightforward puzzles, and occasionally engaging in fairly static gunfights.
There are, in fact, times when the king’s ransom is raised itself. The pub where you share a drink and a ciggie with Tommy is delightfully dirty.
Furthermore, Tommy is voiced by the actor who plays him in the series, Cillian Murphy; Which – given that Murphy will next appear as Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, in Christopher Nolan’s biopic – is quite a coup.
Still, I can’t help but think I’d be even more impressed if I’d previously sat through all six seasons of Peaky Blinders. If you do, maybe add another star, hm, half star to the rating. While adjusting the flat cap, of course.
