YouTubers Life 2 Review
This year’s PLAYCon was not closed due to COVID because getting subscribers is much more important
Release Date: October 19th, 2021
Developers: UPLAY Online
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Price: $29.99 (PC), $39.99 (NSW, XBX, PS)
When YouTube came into existence not long after the internet started to find its footing and becoming such a core part of our lives in the early 2000s, I don't think anyone could have predicted the sheer magnitude and behemoth it would become before being bought by Google. Now being the second most visited site on the internet with some of the highest desktop shares for any site or application - alongside the fact that YouTube takes up the bulk of most people's bandwidth usage - there's no denying how YouTube has become more than just a site for videos, but a genuine tool to help grow, learn, live, and entertain. It's become a career path, a way to teach, a way to inform, a way to find new hobbies, friends, and so much more to people of all sorts of ages, backgrounds, and demographics and instilled now in our day-to-day lives. YouTube, much like any career path that has no guarantee of success, is also a game of playing the algorithms, SEOs, and marketing, and it's this sort of mentality that YouTubers Life 2, just like its predecessor, works with to have players build their new channel and empire from. Despite its title sounding like a potential shovelware game, though, YouTubers Life 2 is a surprisingly fun and enjoyable time that's easy to find yourself spending hours in, even when you only meant to spend a few minutes thank to its easy pick-up-and-play system and design.
The townsfolk celebrate your birthday in the game too! We partied all night long until I passed out at 4AM.
YouTubers Life 2 is a vastly different experience from its predecessor but benefits from this change in just about every way. Going from a more Sims-esque gameplay to a simplistic but humble open-world-ish RPG approach, YouTubers Life 2 is accessible for just about any age group and demographic looking for a laid-back adventure game that won't ask too much of you except for a bit of forgiveness with the repetitive nature of its gameplay. The art direction YouTubers Life 2 has this time around also makes it much more appealing, whereas the first title saw a very bland recreation of what could effectively be a Mii. Now, YouTubers Life 2 gives everyone a much more refined, stylistic, and polished look that is much more pleasing to the eye. This helps show itself off a bit right away as well with you being able to create your own character upon starting a new game, granting a huge amount of customization features for the face, eyes, hair, accessories, and all sorts of clothes to represent yourself or any sort of avatar you want to create. Once you've decided on your own personal name and the name you want to give your channel, you'll then be on your way to NewTube City and starting a new life where your future is as bright as the work you put into it.
What you stream and record is displayed as a minigame prior to editing footage. Be careful for copyright strikes!
NewTube City itself isn't exactly large, but it certainly doesn't feel small either. For the type of game YouTubers Life 2 tries to be, NewTube City is actually very complementary to the lifestyle and routines you'll grow accustomed to as you grow your channel—but growing your channel isn't as simple as just making a new video. Networking is key, along with having to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, keeping posts frequent and relevant, as well as maintaining your equipment. NewTube City has shops of all kinds with a fair amount of people walking the streets and a good portion of them able to be spoken to, giving the city a sense of liveliness that you wouldn't typically expect from a game like this. With the city carefully laid out and spread out into various districts that house other types of commerce and ways of living, it shows a lot of care actually went into making a game that wasn't just about selling copies based off of the names involved but ensuring that the player is the star of the show and making them feel like the core focus of the game rather than an accessory to an already established personality. To go one step further, animals such as cats, dogs, and birds are seen on rooftops, sidewalks, being walked, etc. and gives a more authentic feel to the city life of NewTube City and its inhabitants. It's a small thing to some, but as someone who appreciates environmental design and sees it as one of the most important aspects of game design, it's refreshing to see such care be put into the world as the birds fly over the skies or away if you get too close, petting any fur babies you come into contact with, seeing the waves of the beach peacefully invade and retreat the shorelines, and even watch the sun rise and set with its day/night cycle that plays an important role in how you distribute time throughout the 24 hours allotted to you every time you wake.
Decorating your room with a plethora of assets is one of the most fun parts of YouTubers Life 2. It can become such a large part of your day you won’t realize where the time went until you collapse at 4AM.
The time can be set in 24-hour or 12-hour formats depending on what you select in the options and continues in increments of 15 minutes every couple of seconds. Much like other games that have in-game clocks and shops such as Story of Seasons, they'll be opened only during certain hours and days, but unlike a lot of farming or slice-of-life sims, majority of the shops have extremely flexible hours that don't require you to have to remember what closes when, which is really nice. My biggest pet peeve with management or sim-type games is that the stores always have inconvenient times and days and, for me, never seem to be opened when I need them to be, but with YouTubers Life 2 most shops are usually open when you'd expect them to be in real life (like 9-5, with some going really late well into the night and following morning), and it's really just the Sundays where a bulk of shops will be closed. You can't stay awake forever though, as after 4AM you'll pass out and, if you're on the street, you could potentially lose a lot of what's in your backpack. Even with its flexibility of time and passing days, though, a lot of days can feel like a race against the clock as you're trying to grow your channel and fit in recording videos and completing quests with the energy you have, though thankfully you can eat food that will replenish a good portion of that energy. In the beginning, it may seem like food is crazy expensive, but after you spend a few in-game weeks building your channel a bit more, food becomes very reasonable compared to other things you'll find yourself spending money on instead.
Post all over social media via InstaLife and let the world know what you’ve been up to! PlayStudios, Mantendo, and ZBox all rocked the show.
Even with its humble yet plentiful world of NewTube City, though, it's not without its faults both in terms of design and performance. Getting around NewTube City isn't necessarily a pain and it became rather easy remembering where every shop more or less was after a while, but it's big enough where walking around everywhere can actually eat enough time from your day and can become stressful trying to pack as much as possible into your day especially when you have time-sensitive quests. There's no real fast-travel from store to store and location to location, and instead you'll find yourself having to go through a subway that each district has. It's not the worst way to get around, but it's not the most efficient either with where the subways are usually placed and it became a method I rarely used. There's no dedicated run button to help go faster either (though the normal walking speed is perfectly fine), but there are scooters that you can start using after you've attained a license for them that help you zip across the roads and alleyways. However, while the scooters help tremendously, they're also sporadically placed and only serve as public rentals, so you have to go out of your way to find one versus, say, opening up your backpack or pressing a corresponding button like you would in Pokémon. To make matters worse, talking to anyone gets you off your scooter and causes it to disappear, and going into a building with a scooter then walking back out doesn't cause it to stay where it was. When the hours start going into the graveyard shifts, using that scooter is immensely helpful, it's just an extreme pain that you can only use it for a few seconds before you end up having to get off of it and it disappearing entirely.
Random kawaii moment on the streets before I passed out at 4AM and was mugged
To add to the frustrations, there's no mini-map in the game either which is the reason you'll have to remember every location you go to, and this is especially a pain when following certain quests or tryign to find certain people and having to constantly take out your phone figuring out where someone is when a lot of people are constantly moving. Performance is also all over the place with loading screens and crashes plaguing every building you walk in and out of. Some of the smaller less detailed areas and places can run at a smooth 60fps, where other areas start dropping hugely and can become jarring. By no means does YouTubers Life 2 ever become unplayable, but there's definitely a big room for improvement with a performance patch that could help stabilize it quite a bit and make the overall experience much more enjoyable. While loading screens also feel like they're every which way, they don't really take that long in the grand scheme of things, but it can also become a big mood killer when you see them as often as you do even if they're around 5-10 seconds a piece and start to add up and take away from the immersion with its admittedly addictive yet repetitive formula
Vendors are everywhere, especially City Hall
Overall, YouTubers Life 2 is a rather enjoyable management sim that takes the formula of what would normally be in a cheap mobile game and gives it a nice big-budget polish that makes it a formidable game amongst others in the genre. While most will judge from the title of the game alone and assume it's a nonsensical grab at popularizing YouTubers and getting fans close with some of the site's biggest names and influencers, it's actually more so about building your own empire in a fictional world and city while you run around in various locations in a simple yet well-built town and get yourself accustomed as you follow your dreams towards a successful channel and career. Its RPG coating of gaining levels, subscribers, income, and more with a variety of characters to interact with make it enjoyable as you spend your day-to-day routines deciding what it is you'd like to do in and out of the city and how to interact with its townsfolk, and it's because of this sense of freedom - despite being restricted to a degree by an in-game clock that limits how much you can do during the night without certain upgrades - that makes YouTubers Life 2 a surprisingly welcome addition to the Switch library that is, oddly, a relaxing virtual lifestyle into future endeavors and goals as a content creator.
PROS:
A really good management sims that feels like a more simplistic versions of some of the genres finest
The city and its inhabitants feel lively and enjoyable to be around
While repetitive, can become really addicting as you grow your channel with intuitive ways to edit, play, and record.
CONS:
It crashes a lot and can cause an immense amount of frustration when it happens a few times every play session (NOTE: This is likely due to a pre-release build)
A lack of a minimap and clearer instructions with quests can be annoying with having to constantly stop in place and bring out your phone
Performance, stability, and loading issues makes for an inconsistent experience and limited enjoyability.
A big thank you to Raiser Games and UPLAY Online for providing us a copy of YouTubers Life 2 for the purposes of this review!