Youtubers Life 2 – Our opinion about the game
Youtubers Life 2 is a single player life simulator from Spanish developer U-Play Online & Raiser Games. U-Play also created Youtubers Life in 2017 and also brought us Esports Life Tycoon.
Youtubers Life 2 puts you in the shoes of a promising YouTuber who moves to NewTube City and becomes part of the community there. Your character creation is very varied and can therefore adapt to whatever YouTuber you might have in mind.
Obviously, the main goal of the game is to become a professional YouTuber and involves spending a lot of time filming and editing videos for posting to NewTube, the game’s main video platform. You can film yourself from your home on your computer, your game console or when you are on the go. This is where the signaling issues start to arise as there were no clear instructions on exactly how to carry out this process, so it was mostly guesswork. While the recording part was fairly straightforward after a lot of trial and error, the editing part was the most frustrating.
At the start, the recorded video is divided into four clips which should fit together like a puzzle. However, not all parts come together correctly, which greatly affects your score and the quality of your video. As you progress through the game, the options for connecting clips will increase.There hasn’t been much tutorial on how exactly this works, meaning you have to learn how to do it yourself. . Plus, earning five stars on recordings is somewhat of no use when the edit drastically lowers your overall score and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
Another goal of videos is to gain as much visibility as possible through daily trends. You need to tag them in your shared content in order to reach as many people as possible. Of course, the trends are displayed at the start of the day and you can always come back to them in your journal, but you don’t have the option to watch them while you are creating the videos. This meant that I often had to try to remember what the day trends were and, given their number each day, it proved difficult and hit and miss when it came to improving my visibility.
One of the best new additions to YouTubers Life 2 is, without a doubt, the creation of NewTube City. The previous game was mostly set around the rather claustrophobic boundaries of your bedroom, since you weren’t allowed to go to other rooms in your house. You could, however, leave the apartment completely, but only to attend conferences and events. In YouTubers Life 2, you can walk around the different neighborhoods of NewTube City, exploring the different shops and restaurants in the three neighborhoods. As you walk or ride a scooter, from place to place, there are various access points where you can stop and shoot a video that you can then upload to NewTube.
The influences of The Sims and Stardew Valley are pretty self-explanatory, when it comes to the other characters in town. Much like The Sims, the city is full of NPCs who make their way through life, including characters you can relate to and others that are not at all possible to interact with. However, unlike The Sims games, there aren’t a lot of dialogue options when talking to your new neighbors, and it’s hard to know exactly how to build your relationship with them. For example, when I went to say hello to the coo girl, l Blair, she angrily told me to back off… which seems like a slight overreaction.
YouTuber’s Life 2 is obviously a step up from the previous game, especially with the glossy open world map and unique characters. Unfortunately, the downsides in the form of poor tutorials and questionable mechanics like the energy system left me struggling with the controls and understanding the game more than anything else.
