YouTubers Life OMG! – PS4 | Review

By John Hay
| 28th November 2018
| PS4, Review
| 0

OMG life as a YouTuber is so hard. Who knew?

YouTubers Life OMG plops you down into the life of a mega-famous YouTube star who is narrating his life from his humble beginnings living with his mum while making videos on his crappy little webcam, right through to success at the top of the YouTube pile.

Gameplay is kinda like The Sims with the game opting for the same overhead camera and system of clicking on items in your room to carry out a selection of activities as well as managing your tiredness and hunger along with this as the game progresses you also have to manage a social media and socialising meter. The graphics of the characters really remind me of Nintendo Mii’s but it works.

Your task in the game is to grow your YouTube channel. At the start you choose what your ambition is and what field you want to specialise in. I chose money and gaming and my video empire started to grow around let’s plays and gaming reviews. At this point, it became clear to me that apart from looking a bit different this game is basically game dev story. You make videos about games which basically plays out just like making games in game dev story. Your stats dictate how good of a video you make and the game has a smart little “card” option when you are making videos. Depending on what card you chose you will give certain stats a boost to impact how good your videos will be. You can make different types of video as the game goes on but ultimately the little card minigame is how you will make every video regardless of the style.

Early on in the game as you try to manage your finances you will have to actually go out to work (school too but only in your starter flat) as well as growing your channel. In the early game, you will find it a bit grindy as you have to find a system of going to work than working on videos and repeat it over and over as you try to claw in the funds to upgrade your gaming setup and content creation tools like software and cameras etc. Before long you will become self-sufficient and actually get to the point of having employees to grow the channel.

When I reached the point of having an employee is where I started to see lots of annoying little faults in the game. First off, you have to buy a new gaming rig for each employee, this is the exact same system as you start off with and you have to upgrade it like you did your main unit. Now with your main unit you would buy a PC then upgrade it, you don’t sell your old one it just gets swapped out and your old parts go into some sort of invisible storage that you seem to have no access to because when it comes to computer 2 you have to buy all the same parts all over again. The option to use the parts you already own could be a great help to people set up station 2.

Another big issue for me was when trying to make 2 videos I was obviously smart enough to not have both do a video on PS3 so I would select 1 for PS3 and another for Vita. You would think that would work but nope. For some reason, the person playing Vita has to stand in the spot of the person doing the PS3 game causing you to queue. I found the best way to do 2 things at once was to make one guy focus on console and the other on PC as they don’t have to get stuck in a queue for the play area.

As the game goes on you will attend keynotes to get free games and build developer relationships allowing you to get free games and have them at launch which will allow you to get high views at the start of a videos life and hopefully ride a wave of views. By this point, you will be sick of the card mini-game and you will likely automate making videos as it’s far faster and your character should be at a point of making good videos on their own.

Like most games of this type once you get a rhythm going you know what will be a hit and what will flop so it eventually gets to a point it’s not challenging and seems even more repetitive as you are just playing trying to tick off level goals. If it was a mobile game that idled in the background of prob like it more and ultimately my biggest issue with this is that it would be a better mobile/handheld game. (You can already get it on IOS and Android).

Final Impressions

The game is really repetitive like most of these games are. It’s not perfect by anyone’s standards, there are silly little bugs with the sound glitching and some gameplay glitches where you get stuck in an action (quick quit and reload sorts these) but these are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. If you like games like game dev story you will enjoy it.

*Code kindly provided by the publisher for review*

Developer: Raiser Games / Publisher: UPlay Online
Release date: 21/11/2018
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Platform Reviewed on: PS4 Pro