Do you wanna be the very best YouTuber?
Like no one ever was?
Well here comes YouTuber's Life to let you do just that.
YouTuber's Life is essentially a tycoon game in the vein of classics like Theme Hospital
or Lemonade Tycoon.
The goal of the game is to become the biggest YouTuber on the site
by making videos and making yourself known to all the other creators.
While I normally love this sort of game -
Theme Hospital is a game I can pick up and play ANY time and have a blast -
YouTuber's Life screws up some of the basic mechanics of this kind of game
and makes the whole experience a terrible chore.
In a way it's kind of impressive.
The creators managed to make a game where you experience the tedium of ACTUALLY
attempting to be a big creator on YouTube.
Hours upon hours of mind-numbing repetition
in order to slowly get your numbers up.
It makes for a pretty miserable gaming experience
but it sure does illustrate what a YouTube career is really like.
Most of these games involve doing the same actions over and over again
but they do something that YouTuber's Life doesn't:
they keep it short and sweet.
This is the fatal flaw of YouTuber's Life.
It spreads its goals out WAY too far and keeps you doing the same mind-numbing shit for far too long.
The truly irritating part about it all
is that it does it right for the first few hours.
The first few goals are dished up at a good pace
and it feels fun to be doing the same tasks over and over
but after a while, it starts to spread out the rewards too thin
and the tedium is starkly revealed.
It took me at least 10 hours - real time -
to hit one million subscribers and at that point I was expected to become number one
which involved getting more than double that with little to speed that process up.
And you know what made me want to absolutely SCREAM?
While I was spending HOURS trying to make enough subs to be number one
ALL of the other YouTubers ahead of me were increasing their subs as well.
Yeah, the game doesn't give you static numbers to try to beat
it forces you onto a treadmill where you are constantly trying to catch up to everyone else's arbitrary numbers.
My guess is that they wanted to simulate what actually happens on YouTube -
nobody's numbers stay the same so you ARE on a sub treadmill -
but translating that into a game of this type is an infuriatingly stupid decision.
All this really accomplished was padding out the length of the game
into something that went from pretty fun to HORRIBLY boring.
Let me break down what you're doing in the game post-one million subs.
First of all, I have the big mansion here so I'm able to have 3 collaborators with me.
These characters are there to either talk to, make videos on their own
or make collaboration videos.
Making videos with these characters is identical to making them by yourself
so they're really just there to beef up your numbers.
From there you're doing the same things:
having your collaborators make videos or improve their skills via courses,
making videos yourself, buying stuff -
which is usually computer upgrades, random items, food, etc -
sleep and eating.
Over
and over
and over.
You're able to go to events like parties and movies
but they aren't exciting and exist only to increase relationship levels with the other characters.
Just queue up a bunch of dialogue options and wait.
Enthralling.
Man, I am having SO much fun right now you guys.
Sometimes there are shops that let you buy an exclusive item after achieving a small goal -
like getting a date -
but that's about it.
These side events are as dull as dishwater and are essentially pointless at this stage of the game.
You've likely already met most of the characters,
so you can just log onto your computer and chat to them for a while to increase how much they like you.
Oh, I guess I should tell you why that even matters and..
well, for the most part it kinda doesn't.
You DO need to do this in order to hire collaborators
but once you've got that, then you don't need to keep up your relationships whatsoever.
All you need to do is avoid making them loathe you -
which will cause them to constantly downvote your videos -
and you're good.
You can also start a relationship with another character
but that also takes a long time and doesn't really have any payoff.
They could've taken some cues here from something like Harvest Moon but nope!
So the developers added in side events meant to distract from the tedium of clicking the same options over and over
but they managed to make these events even MORE tedious than the core gameplay.
I gotta hand it to this team for THAT accomplishment.
How the heck did you guys manage that, anyway?
At least I can speed up time in the game and set videos to be edited automatically.
Awe yeah, I can just have the game play itself!
Editing is another aspect of the game that is fun at first but quickly grows stale.
Editing involves matching your available cards, which can be changed as you earn more,
and matching them to the situation at hand.
Once you've gotten a perfect match, that prompt will forever show the correct card to use via an icon.
This is certainly useful but at the same time it turns editing into a boring matching game pretty quickly.
One that I personally skipped as much as possible.
Add all of that to graphics that aren't impressive and honestly kind of ugly..
Ugh..
and a multitude of bugs that range from items getting stuck
to losing the ability to take any actions without shutting the dame down entirely
and you've got quite a failure on your hands.
Honestly, YouTuber's Life had potential
and if the development team cared enough, they could go back and retool things to make it work better.
Keeping sub goals static -
as in don't have the rivals gain more subs as you play -
shortening the time it takes to achieve goals,
adding actual fun sidequests into things like the parties,
and eliminating the irritating bugs would bring this game WAY up in my estimation.
As it is, YouTuber's Life is only fun for the first couple hours
but quickly devolves into maddening tedium afterward.
Since this one left Early Access, I assume it's not going all that much
so it's really not worth the money and it's not worth your sanity.
Chuck it in the bin and play Theme Hospital again instead.