Re: Life Simulator, an alternative to Bitlife
I have mixed feelings on this game. I've played through a few runs of it, and there are definitely pros and cons. For one thing, this is the kind of game that requires a ton of grinding. It's a lot of just double tapping to get your stats or finances up, and it can get very repetitive after awhile, especially since there don't seem to be all that many random events. Speaking of random events, once one does pop up, your focus doesn't go back to the button you had been previously furiously double tapping, which means you have to swipe to it all over again. That can be a pain if the thing you were doing is buried somewhat deep in the list of options.
Next, this doesn't feel very realistic. Things such as petting your cat should not take a whole week, plus I think the work-life balance is skewed, considering you have to spend the vast majority of your time working so that you can earn a promotion so that you might make enough money to scrape by. Now, that very well may be an intentional statement on the state of American society, but if so, there should definitely be some cynical backstory involved there. The deadlines imposed by your health and well-being getting low, I have very mixed feelings on that. On the one hand, it makes sense, but there's something vaguely disturbing about becoming suicidal like clockwork, and then all you have to do is take a couple weeks' worth of vacation time, or walk in a park? It kinda doesn't work like that, although this is a game, so I can't get too hung up on that particular point. Finally, I think I found a minor bug, which I think only bothers me as much as it does because of the problems I've already cited with the game. So when your children are under 18, their happiness quotient doesn't ever drop below 1000. You can literally neglect them until they move out, which, incidentally, is another thing I don't like, the fact you get kicked out at the age of 18, and you also kick your kids out when they turn 18, no if's, and's or but's. It's a rather old-fashioned attitude for the dev to have taken.
So, what do I like about this game? It's extremely accessible, which is always a plus, but in this particular case, it does feel like extra effort was put into it to make it that way. The grinding is both a blessing and a curse, because there is something oddly soothing and satisfying about watching your assets rise methodically, even if I'm not 100% sold on the way it's done. The random events that do exist are realistic for the most part, although I don't know how many times one can have food poisoning or fall into a manhole while texting in a lifetime. All in all, I think this is the kind of game you can enjoy on a rainy day, but it's not the kind of thing you can come back to over and over again, unless the dev intends to add more content.
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