Welcome to another VR Job Hub where every weekend gmw3 gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and now Web3 industries, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there are always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (community@gmw3.com).
We’ll see you next week on gmw3 at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
At the end of March real-time strategy (RTS) title Final Assault finally came to PlayStation VR, but only for North American players. Developer Phaser Lock Interactive has recently confirmed that the title will now make its way to the European PlayStation Store in a few days.
The studio made the announcement via Twitter, locking down Tuesday 12th May for the launch, expanding the player base for those all important multiplayer matches.
It has been a little while coming, with the PC VR version released almost a year ago. As VRFocuslearnt from an interview with Phaser Lock Interactive’s CEO Michael Daubert, the delay was down to trying to make frame rate, easily achieved on PlayStation 4 Pro, not so on the original PlayStation 4. This did mean sacrifices had to be made such as unit caps.
All the work has meant that both PC and console players can face one another, pitting their WWII forces in battle. Offering both single-player and multiplayer modes, Final Assault is a tabletop style RTS where players can select from six divisions, each with its own specialised ground and aerial units.
Looking down on the battlefield, players can quickly drop troops down whilst individually or group manoeuvring jeeps, tanks, and artillery to take over or reinforce strategic positions, call in planes to patrol the skies or execute airstrikes on enemy troops. Or when they’ve unlocked their top tier armaments assault the enemy base with bombing runs and other heavy weapons.
When reviewing the original PC version of Final Assault VRFocus said: “There’s plenty to love about Final Assault. Providing a leaner less complicated approach to RTS gameplay, most fans of the genre apart from the die-hard stalwarts should find there’s enough depth and reply value to keep coming back for hours on end.”
Phaser Lock Interactive isn’t stopping the franchise there, with more content and updates planned for the near future. Plus the studio is also working on a new project with a focus towards PlayStation VR and Oculus Quest.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Phaser Lock Interactive and its VR projects, reporting back with all the latest news.
Last week Phaser Lock Interactive released Final Assault for PlayStation VR, allowing the console players to engage in cross-platform war with PC VR opponents. When VRFocus interviewed the studios’ CEO Michael Daubert he revealed that the porting process to PlayStation 4 hadn’t been easy and that an Oculus Quest version currently wasn’t being considered. However, the studio has other plans in store with a new virtual reality (VR) title in the works.
Due to the limitations Phaser Lock Interactive encountered when porting Final Assault to PlayStation VR and testing Oculus Quest’s potential, Daubert noted that their next videogame would be looking at these two popular headsets first: “We’re already moving into a new project that we’re in preproduction and the Quest and PlayStation VR are our base models.”
While he wouldn’t go into further details about the new project because it was at an early stage Daubert did discuss the studios’ intentions for maximising the Oculus Quest platform: “Now we’ve had the Quest for some time we’re building from the bottom up, so we’re really taking into account what the Quest is great at, where its power lies and making sure we’re building the systems in the right direction for that optimisation and still delivering high-quality game mechanics and gameplay but understand the limitations of what the Quest has.”
To date, Phaser Lock Interactive has released Final Approach, Final Approach: Pilot Edition, Twisted Arrow and of course Final Assault. Most of which involve miniature vehicles and some real-time strategy (RTS), so there’s a good chance the team will stick with what they know – who doesn’t love some tabletop VR gaming?
Available for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, Windows Mixed Reality and now PlayStation VR, VRFocus’PC review found Final Assault provided hours of entertaining gameplay in both single-player and multiplayer modes: “There’s plenty to love about Final Assault. Providing a leaner less complicated approach to RTS gameplay, most fans of the genre apart from the die-hard stalwarts should find there’s enough depth and reply value to keep coming back for hours on end.”
When Phaser Lock Interactive releases further details about the new project, VRFocus will let you know.
The accessible VR RTS from Phaser Lock, Final Assault, is now out on PSVR. Check out our thoughts on the port in our full review!
When virtual reality arrived years ago, there were a few genres people often expected the tech to benefit most. We heard how horror, racing, and music and rhythm games would be revolutionized once they started to implement headsets, and in many ways they have been.
One genre I didn’t anticipate getting much of a boost from a VR headset is real-time strategy, but play just a few minutes of Final Assault, and it will quickly be evident how virtual reality can innovate even the most unexpected of genres.
Final Assault is a cartoonish take on the RTS genre. With its vibrant battlefields and exaggerated character models, it’s a game that looks as serious as something on Nickelodeon. The sound design is similarly lighthearted. This isn’t a harrowing war story. It’s an animated feature, set in a fictional WWII-like arena but never so much as flying an actual Nazi flag. But what this colorful setup hides is a respectable commitment to its gameplay, amplified in ways only VR can.
Across several game modes including two kinds of campaigns against NPCs, free play, and cross-platform PvP, Final Assault pits players in a tug-of-war for resources. With classic lane-centric map layouts skillfully organized to promote constant tactical considerations, the only thing childish about the game is its color palette. Each side manages a squad of their choosing, split among several Hero characters, and each of them provides a few variations on your available army. Resources must be managed carefully, with cooldown timers affecting strategy as much as enemy movement. Let your guard down too soon or mismanage your soldiers and you’ll be waving the white flag in no time.
A long list of troops, tanks, dogfighters, and more round out a fun roster of war toys and it’s up to you to decide who to deploy as well as where and when to send them into battle. Each unit serves a definitive purpose and part of the fun comes in experimenting to find the right combat strategy.
Have a fighter jet hit the skies and watch as it takes on enemies high above the battlefield. Send in an infantry truck full of soldiers and watch them storm the gates. Your soldiers are reliable enough to wage war on their own should you simply drop them into battle, but the more satisfying moments come when you lead them directly to where you want to focus your attack, even drawing their precise route with the VR controls. Conversely, it’s just as exciting to feel the good anxiety of the genre when the enemy is assaulting your side of the map and your resources are depleted, suddenly seeming agonizingly slow to refill.
These are staples of the genre, and seasoned fans may expect to find these same scenes in any RTS, but virtual reality truly does bring the whole experience to another level. With the headset on, you become the ever-present overseer of the entire battlefield. Combined with the cartoonish style of it all, Final Assault revealed its best but least expected attribute: it makes one feel like a kid with a toy box full of action figures.
Zooming in on over the shoulders of your heroes, dropping cars here, tanks there, hanging an airstrike right over the enemy base, it wasn’t long into my time with Final Assault before I felt like I had time traveled to 20 years ago, like I took a Saturday as a kid, turned my toy box upside down, and let my imagination run wild.
This is all made better by difficulty options that let you ease into the war as slowly or quickly as you want. It can be hectic at first glance, with individual battles happening all over the bombed-out streets, but I found starting on easy allowed me to not only learn the VR controls, but also worry less about my defenses, letting me take in each scene up close, admiring the excitement in every corner of the warzone.
Comfort
Final Assault uses VR wands, and you can choose which handles troops and which navigates your resource menu, even swapping between them whenever you want to. It’s convenient in that way, but the actual movement may cause trouble. Typically I’ve only ever gotten nauseated while playing VR with first-person games where I’ve walked too closely to walls. But with Final Assault, the pinching and zooming across each map leaves me feeling sick after less than an hour each time. As always with VR, your experience may vary greatly from mine in this regard, but because these motion controls somewhat mirror my legacy issue of walking near walls, I’d caution that you may have a similarly queasy experience if that’s been your problem with VR in the past too.
Final Assault PSVR Review Final Verdict
There’s a fun focus on planning and improvising in Final Assault, making it an engaging, albeit somewhat less involved, entry for the genre even if it wasn’t on a headset, but in virtual reality, the RTS shines as an imaginative chest of colorful toys. Just make sure when you’re planning your attack to call in a supply drop of dramamine.
This week Phaser Lock Interactive finally brought its real-time strategy (RTS) title Final Assault to PlayStation VR, offering cross-platform gameplay with PC VR players. When VRFocus spoke with the studios’ CEO Michael Daubert about development he did mention some changes had to be made to ensure fairness across the platforms. The topic of Oculus Quest also came up and how a port is very unlikely.
Chuckling, he said: “We would love to be on the Quest. It’s not feasible. The Quest would be such a challenge, it’s just a different beast in itself.”
One of the core characteristics of Final Assault is its PvP multiplayer mode and the fact that all players no matter the supported headset can engage in online battles together. “If we did do a Quest version it probably wouldn’t be cross-platform because we just wouldn’t be able to support that,” Daubert notes. “We want to make sure we’re delivering the same experience across all platforms. With that being said it doesn’t mean a Quest version is out of the question, it’s something we’d have to do a deep dive into and really explore what that would look like.”
So if Phaser Lock Interactive did decide to make a version of Final Assault for Oculus Quest then it would purely be for the headset, designed to make use of its particular features. Most likely cutting back on all the troop’s players can deploy to maintain a smooth experience.
As Daubert has previously mentioned, Phaser Lock Interactive still has further plans for Final Assault. So as details are released VRFocus will let you know.
Today sees Phaser Lock Interactive launch its real-time strategy (RTS) title Final Assaultfor PlayStation VR, offering cross-platform multiplayer gaming with its PC-based brethren. But as VRFocus has learnt in a new interview with CEO Michael Daubert, porting the title proved to be a technical juggling act. Just like real warfare, this has provided gains and losses.
The table-top RTS has been available for PC VR headsets for almost a year and last summer Phaser Lock Interactive confirmed work was well underway on a PlayStation VR port. In fact, the port was completed in 2019 until the team hit a little snag: “We were working on the PlayStation Pro. So the pro was two months worth of work, easy port over we were happy with it and then the classic (PlayStation 4) was like taking a step back to the 90s, I felt like we were working on the N64 again,” mentions Daubert.
This meant the team had to finely optimise the PlayStation 4 version to make frame rate. “The good thing is nothing changed on the play mechanics or the game mechanics themselves, it still plays the same way,” he notes. “The major changes are in art on the classic and then we had to put unit caps.”
Originally, Final Assault allowed PC players to wage massive wars with no units caps whatsoever, that’s all about to change. “PlayStation just does not allow that,” says Daubert. “So players moving into this are going to see a change in play style. They’re not going to be able to create these huge balls of death and push them forward on the infantry, they’re going to have to find different strategies which is kind of a new challenge for the players.
“It’s not changing it drastically, it’s just going to a more realistic expectation when it comes down to RTS’s, exactly how much micromanagement and how much you can have on the screen at one time.”
To ensure matches are fair no matter which headset players are using the cap is universal: “The cap is for all versions across all platforms. Because we are cross-platform we had to balance on the PC and the PlayStation side,” he states.
While mainly technical, this decision was also made with help from Final Assault’s Discord community, asking them what they could live and not live without. So while troops might be a little more limited the addition of PlayStation VR players will expand the match pool. “What we want is that player base, that user base so that when they go into that PvP queue we’re knocking down those times waiting for a game. We’re bringing in a brand new player base when it comes to the PSVR and we’re excited for the PC people to get some ‘fresh meat’.”
PC players – and those on PlayStation VR – will also have new content to play with: “We wanted to reward the PC players that have been sticking with us through these five months of porting because we haven’t been able to do a lot of updates or patches because we’ve been so heads down in getting the port done we’re giving two new vehicles and two new maps; called our Vanguard DLC,” Daubert adds.
Fans of Final Assault will also be pleased to know Phaser Lock Interactive has more plans in store with Daubert confirming: “With this launch the game is not finished. We consider Final Assault will never be finished, it is something we will constantly be supporting. So we want to be adding new updates, we’ll be doing patches; making sure balancing patches are getting in there, listening to the players and making sure their concerns are heard.”
As Phaser Lock Interactive continues to support Final Assault, VRFocus will keep you updated on the latest updates.
VRFocus brings you another list of virtual reality (VR) videogames for users of all leading headsets to enjoy over the next week. Make sure to check out the accompanying video for a preview of each title’s gameplay and make sure to follow all our social channels to get further updates including reviews, re-releases and possible expansion packs.
Orders Of Magnitude – Ouroboro Soft Inc.
In this educational virtual reality science experience, learn about the whole observable universe at multiple scales. Explore everything from a tiny atomic nucleus to the whole Milky Way, all there to be explored. Featuring data taken from various scientific databases, users can visualise galaxies and stars as well as delving deep into human brain and DNA atoms.
From White Door Games, the studio behind Robo Recall: Unplugged and Gunheart, this new horror survival videogame is set in the town of Slumber, Alaska. College student Mae is on a mission to save her father from the townsfolk and creatures who have infected her hometown. You must fend off hordes of these monsters with your arsenal of various weapons, including shotguns, knives and explosives while solving various puzzles along the way. Also coming to Oculus Rift 14th April.
In this wave-based arcade-action title, you play as a weaponless gentle giant who has woken from a slumber and must defend himself using any surrounding objects. Throw, catch and dodge any obstacles thrown at you in this storybook-style comical world featuring a full campaign.
Quick thinking is essential in this World War 2-themed action title, where you must command your troops as they enter into massive battles on land in tanks and in the air with dog fights. Previously released in 2019 on other leading headsets, VRFocusawarded the PC edition a 4/5.
Supported Platforms: PlayStation VR
Launch Date: 31st March
Guns’N’Stories: Bulletproof VR – MiroWin
This action-packed western-style shooter fully immerses you into a Wild West setting as you encounter and fight off a series of cartoonish enemies. Duel wield various classic and modern weapons and move quickly avoiding incoming bullets in a series of detailed and varied locations.
Phaser Lock Interactive launched its WW2-themed real-time strategy (RTS) title Final Assault almost a year ago for PC-based virtual reality (VR) headsets. When VRFocusspoke with the studios’ creative director Todd Bailey last summer he mentioned that with the PC version finished they were working on the PlayStation VR port. Today, it has been confirmed that Final Assault will be coming to the headset next week.
Offering cross-platform gameplay between PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift/Rift S, HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Final Assault is a tabletop style battle between Allied and Axis forces offering both single-player and multiplayer modes.
Players are able to select from six divisions, each with its own specialised ground and aerial units as they seek to dominate their opponent. With a god-like overview of the battlefield, they can manoeuvre jeeps, tanks, and artillery in massive ground battles whilst executing airstrikes and bombing runs to destroy the enemy base.
“We feel we found the sweet spot on mixing RTS and Moba gameplay, taking what we feel is the best of the best that has ultimately ended up creating a new genre that can only exist in VR. And our game leans more on the PVP gameplay, and let’s face it, there are not a lot of cross-play multiplayer games out there. So now bringing in the PSVR users we hope to increase the player base and give more opportunities for fast matchmaking across all the headset,” said Phaser Lock Interactive CEO Michael Daubert in a statement.
In conjunction with the PlayStation VR launch, Phaser Lock Interactive will be adding new units, maps and customisation options for all platforms, so there’s no difference in content.
VRFocusreviewed Final Assaultfor launch, giving it a decent four-star rating whilst saying: “Much, in the same way, VRFocus enjoyed Brass Tactics, Final Assault is another superb example of why table-top gaming works in VR.”
Final Assault is scheduled for launch on 31st March for PlayStation VR, rounding off a bumper March for VR videogames. As further updates for the RTS title are released, VRFocus will let you know.
Developer Phaser Lock Interactive announced that Final Assault has passed PlayStation’s TRC (Technical Requirements Check) and a release date will be announced later this month. Each platform has its own version of a TRC, which takes the form of a document given to developers detailing all the requirements that a game must adhere to before it releases onto the platform.
With the TRC check out of the way, Final Assault is closer than ever for PSVR fans. One of the best aspects of the PSVR port is that it will support cross platform PVP with the PC VR release as well. They noted that “it was a tough port” to get Final Assault onto the PlayStation platform, but they’re excited for fans to get their hands on it.
The game is a VR real-time strategy (RTS) game with a cartoony art style, set during World War II. We enjoyed the PC VR version of the game on release and we went hands-on with the PSVR version back in September of last year. Not only was the PSVR version on par with PC VR version, but the PSVR launch will also bring new content to both versions of the game, featuring two new maps, new divisions, and new customization options.
Some performance changes had to be made to the game in order to achieve parity and cross play compatibility with all platforms, according to Final Assault designer Todd Bailey back in September. “Our fan base has been very lenient with us so far, they’ve been understanding about the changes we’ve had to make. They want more people to play against. The biggest complaint we get is that they keep playing against the same people.”
As a beginning-to-mid level RTS, Final Assault should feel right at home on PSVR. Keep an eye out for a release date later this month.
Orders Of Magnitude – Ouroboro Soft Inc.
Good Goliath – Knocktwice Games