YouTubers Life Early Access Review

Every wondered what it would be like to sit at home making YouTube videos and racking up hundreds of thousands of pounds (or dollars)? In fact ever thought about earning so much from YouTube that you have your own space-station mansion? YouTubers Life, a simulation game from U-Play Online lets you experience just that. Create your character, choose the type of videos you want to record and start uploading. Start as a teenager living a home, but keep on uploading and that floating space-station house will soon be yours.

Storyline

YouTubers Life only has the very basics of a storyline. You’re now a powerful and famous billionaire YouTuber, and this is the retrospective story of how you came to be so. Not really worth going into verse and chapter about it, after all it’s the story to hold the game together. It’s not a story-driven game.

Gameplay

YouTubers Life starts off way, way into the future as you, a multi-billionaire YouTuber sits in your floating space-mansion to tell the story of how you become the Goliath of YouTube as you are now. Going back in time to when you’re a humble teenager, living at home and trying to upload as many videos as possible between studying.

First you have to create your avatar. There are a fair few options to choose from to create your perfect YouTuber Star but more are unlocked and purchased by way of the in-game menus. You also have a choice of the type of YouTuber you want to be. At the moment musician and gamer are available but more are set to be unlocked in the future. Once you’ve created your character the game starts with a brief tutorial of the general controls and premises of the game.

The primary task in YouTubers Life as you can probably imagine is to upload YouTube videos, now depending on the type of YouTuber you are, this will either be game or music related. Gamers will start with making gameplay videos while Musicians will do Karaoke covers of pre-released songs. In either case you first need to choose the components of the video (i.e. which game and what type of video for gamers, and which song, and music genre for musicians)

Once done you move into the video recording part. Your video is broken up into a number of parts, and for each part you’ll need to respond with an appropriate response (by the response cards) i.e. if you find a secret area, you can respond with a happy cheer, a sarcastic comment or a little dance etc.

The final step is to add things like titles and colour blur to increase the post production value of your video. Once you publish your video all of the cards, reactions and post-production changes are taken into account to devise a score and your skill increases. A score indicates how popular the video is going to be, while skill increases show how much better you have become at things like writing scripts, recording sound, and video editing etc. Then you just have to wait a few hours for the video to edit and upload and you can start watching those pennies roll in.

That’s the video editing part but there are many more things to consider. Your first videos are rather basic and a little sketchy, and to get better quality videos you need higher quality equipment and this doesn’t come for cheap. Not to mention the endless stream of games, or music, consoles or musical instruments you have to buy.

You need to supplement your video uploading with getting money. You can perform jobs to get some extra cash, but when you move out of home, you also have rent and food to pay for. It’s a balancing act between getting money, studying and learning, working and don’t forget actually leaving the house once in a while to go to the movies or on a date.

Graphics & Sound

I like how everything looks in YouTubers Life. Everything has a rounded cartoonishness to it that really works, much like the Avatars on the Nintendo Wii. Sound is done in a similar vein, with the odd conversational Simlish type sound. It’s not awesome, but in a game like this, who cares quite frankly. The graphics and sound tie the game together perfectly.

Controls

There’s nothing to worry about here. You do everything with the mouse. OK, you might need a keyboard to type names for things, but generally speaking if you have a mouse then you won’t have any issue, making your virtual YouTube billions.

Difficulty

Difficulty is a difficult thing to gauge in this case. There are no big bosses to defeat, health bars to watch. It’s purely a matter of keeping as many plates spinning as possible. Sure, at first you may have difficulty having enough money for all the games and upgrades you want but I wouldn’t say it’s ever difficult. It’s set at a slow but enjoyable constant progression.

Replayability

There’s a fair bit of replayability in YouTubers Life. Right now you have two career paths each of which are different enough to be worthy of a replay. Once they introduce the other modes you’ll have even more options to try.

Would you need to replay the same YouTuber type over and over again? Probably not, but it’s fun enough to pick up and dedicate an hour or so of your time towards every now and then.

YouTubers Life is available from Steam Early Access at the low price of around £11 / $15