This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Review by Casual Tap
Youtubers Life 2, developed by UPLAY Online and published by Raiser Games, is a life sim game. As suggested by its title, you play as a small Youtuber and aspire to be a big time star. When you start the game, you can see there are a good variety of character customisations. You will be assisted by a drone and it will work as your cameraman as well because you will need it for taking pictures and even doing live streaming later in the game. There are three big areas where you can choose to live and work, and you can use subway to fast travel back and forth between these areas. Everywhere you go, you will see pop culture references especially in the video game industry, at least in my playthrough. You even have a chance to meet real life famous Youtuber characters in the game!
How to play the game? If you are familiar with Stardew Valley or Story of Season, you will understand the premise easily. The game loop is divided into day and night and season. Most of the tasks will require your energy (stamina). And if you run out of it, you can’t do anything else unless you eat some food or start a new day by going to bed. Also make sure you go to bed before 4am. Or something bad will happen to you.
In this game you will need money – lots of money! Just like any business, capital is important for growth because you need to upgrade your computer hardware like cpu, gpu and hdd more often than not because the ones you currently have will not be working forever! And for the drone, you need to continually upgrade its functions i.e. to capture pictures during the rain or at night. In addition, you need to constantly upgrade your video recording and editing skills, your look and room customisation to appeal to more fans. In a daily game loop, you check your phone to see what’s trendy for that particular day. You visit places to take pictures or make videos according to the #thingy on the trend and post them on Instalife or NewTube. You can use Instalife where other people post pictures about the trend, so you can visit those places right away easily without wandering around. However, most of the time, you do gaming things, so you have to spend on consoles and lots of games too. What’s more, you can check out daily job and earn a commission. You can also improve your relationship with the locals by talking to them or doing jobs for them.
The main quest is like your long-time goal, for example to reach a certain Youtuber tier level so that you can get i.e a VIP card to access a new area. And your side quest is like your current struggles i.e. you save money to buy a new HDD.
It’s worth pointing out that time does fly in this game! There are many things to do and explore but you have to keep you eyes on the clock. In my playthrough, I didn’t need to eat anything because I wanted to explore more and do more things against the clock. And stay vigilant! After the midnight, the clock turns red to warn you, but there’re no sound alerts and you might miss it, anyway. There’s a date bar but not a complete calendar, so you cannot check the upcoming events. And there’s no ‘confirm buy’ option and you might accidently buy something you don’t want because of your itchy random press on the button. Besides, fps issues can persist in some areas like the City Hall and the beach during the stormy day. However, it’s smooth like butter in the Downtown. It, however, didn’t hinder my experience that much as it is a life sim and I was a chilling player. I think it can be fixed in the future update
Conclusion
I never played the original Youtubers Life game, but this sequel is surprisingly very good. The gameplay is immersive! And there is a great variety to it. For me, it didn’t feel like a chore to do different things on a daily basis because they were all fun to do anyway. Plus, I could choose how I played it. For the amount of fun it gave me, I now give it 8/10.… Expand
