Life Makeover

Life Makeover

released on Jul 28, 2022

Life Makeover

released on Jul 28, 2022

Life Makeover is a social simulation game, you can create your very own avatar, customize dress-up and makeup, and you could even be a designer, from cutting to sewing, DIY a unique set of your outfit. Dream home, from locating to interior design, build the very home for you by yourself, invite your BFFs to have a party anytime, and chat freely in your space! Bring Your Dreams to Life - Inspire Life Makeover now with your shining free will!


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Like...ok, I get it. I know this genre of game. You put on your higher rating clothes, end up looking like a 5 year old trying on mom's clothes, and get the hightest points possible, hoping to win some more clothes. That's it. That's what the game is for.

But PLEASE give me something more! The storyline sucks. The events are all. always. the same. The clothes are cute, and the customization is cute, but it's always almost good enough.

It lacks more backgrounds to take pictures of your dolls. It lacks more interesting characters. It lacks originality in its events. It overflows in currencies, there's too many of them to keep up with. It overflows in things to do that don't necessarily make sense. There's a lack of intuitiveness in its UI that almost drives me to despair. The home/life sim part is incredibly useless and completely disconnected from literally anything else in the game, what is it even doing there?

And still... It gives you just enough free resources that you can get just enough new high level clothing items. You get just enough currency (of whatever variety) to buy most expensive items. You get an absurd number of (repetitive, but ok) events that give you an outfit each.

If they had a little bit more of originality, if they tweaked a few things... they could truly triumph over their competition. Its already copying them anyway.

I think a lot of people (mid-range cope) dream of a robust, visually gorgeous, user-friendly, scrimblo wardrobe simulator. A thingamabob that you can build OCs with, and let you choose from a wide range of clothes to drip them out in and pose and rotate to your heart’s content. Anybody who’s spent ungodly amount of time in /gpose knows this, the people who use Koikatsu also know this but won’t readily admit it.

My experience with fashion games - namely Love Nikki and Style Savvy kind of highlights that the entire concept of gamifying the subjectivity of fashion is something of a mug’s game. They all crumble in the exact same way, by the fact that challenges posed by the game i.e. “make an outfit with X theme” always falls to using the ingame search function and highlighting the exact tags it’s asking for, then selecting the best article of clothing in each category. What else are you going to do, actually plot out an outfit that bangs? This dumb bitch algorithm doesn’t know what colour schemes are, mismatching, wrong sizing for the body type, etc. The outfit you submit will receive a score and it will Never make sense. Your character will look like a biblically accurate secondhand rug store but you’ll Perfect the mission and you’ll learn to like it - because you’re Powergaming - it's all a means to an end: to see ur OC in a new story mission reward jacket that will tie everything together.

It’s not great!! The fact that this is a mobile game gives Life Makeover carte blanche to take the absolute piss. Your progress isn’t gated by your style savviness and outfit co-ordination, but entirely by you not having high enough arbitrarily-graded clothes. This is where the gatcha stuff comes in and I don’t even need to tell you that it’s stingy as fuck because you’d already have guessed. Why do I need to grind so much to dye the clothes too jesus christ show some mercy. I’d honestly recommend playing a hacked .apk of the game if I knew those existed.

I’ve played Life Makeover back at release on mobile briefly, and again now that it’s gotten a fully-fledged PC port. Man I think this game is so pretty. I love how detailed every article of clothing is, I love how the physics makes the multi-layered dresses and hair flow. This being a game developed in China there’s a pretty strong lean towards incredibly well-rendered opulent traditional hanfu clothing, which is inexplicably the most 'overpowered' clothing in any situation, it’s pretty funny but I respect it. Love the wildly undercooked Sims-lite homebuilding thing it has going on too. Love the awful murder mystery storyline with a first-pass translation that the voice actors were clearly not allowed to stray from. Given enough time & patience and hopefully none of your money, you rack up a surprisingly varied array of clothes and then you can finally play the game, which is to just make nice fits. Is it WORTH all of that effort? No, but



This review contains spoilers

(Minha review da Steam. TEXTO ENORME CUIDADO)

Mesmo sabendo tudo que me aguardava (Basicamente um emulador mobile, microtransações, gameplay diferente dos anúncios), eu ainda me senti extremamente decepcionada com esse jogo... Acho que o maior motivo disso se trata da quantidade massiva de microtransações e o quanto elas impedem o progresso da história.

Eu sinceramente não consigo ver o apelo em gastar dinheiro nesse jogo, visto que quase todas as mecânicas são introduzidas como um motivo para você gastar o máximo de dinheiro possível. O "Modo Difícil" e a criação de roupas (Ambos são necessários para avançar na história) são os melhores exemplos disso. Coisas que supostamente deveriam aumentar o divertimento dos jogadores servem apenas como um aviso enorme dizendo "Por favor gaste dinheiro com esse jogo".

O pior disso é que a história é extremamente cativante. Os visuais (3D e 2D) são feitos com bastante atenção aos detalhes e são absolutamente lindos. As animações são ótimas e (Pelo menos pra mim) o jogo rodou decentemente.
Enquanto eu jogava e me divertia em fazer roupas, eu sempre pensava; "Nossa, que pena que, quando eu ler o próximo capítulo e meus pontos de energia acabarem, eu vou ter que parar de jogar". E eu acho que esse jogo (E quase todos os outros jogos mobiles) são exatamente isso; Uma pena.

Eu frequentemente pensei em qual seria o asset favorito dos desenvolvedores, ou qual a parte da história que eles mais gostaram de escrever. Eu tentei imaginar as inúmeras horas que os modeladores e animadores passaram quando estavam fazendo as animações de cada personagem, ou quando estavam fazendo cada peça de roupa e cabelo... E eu pensei que eu provavelmente não seria capaz de experienciar tudo que os desenvolvedores criaram, simplesmente porque eu me recuso à gastar 5 dólares pra poder ganhar 100 moedas e comprar mais sapatos pra criar um vestido ou qualquer coisa do gênero.

Por mais que eu não recomende esse jogo, eu ainda vou tentar sofrer um pouco mais com ele porque eu realmente quero saber mais da história. É só uma pena que eu tenha que sofrer por não gastar dinheiro do que apenas me divertir independente disso.

EDIT1:
Um dia depois de escrever essa review, eu fui logar para ler a história novamente. Eu precisava de um item para craftar uma peça de roupa, mas, pra conseguir o item, eu precisava rejogar uma fase que eu já havia jogado no Modo História Normal e então dar Raid na fase pra poder obter a quantidade necessária do item (Eu precisava de no mínimo 10).
Acontece que o jogo introduziu uma nova mecânica chamada "Challenges", que basicamente servem para dar cockblock.
Essencialmente: cada fase possui 3 Challenges que são regenerados por dia, e quando esses Challenges acabam, você não pode dar Raid na fase. Caso você queira restaurar os Challenges, você precisa gastar diamantes. Alternativamente, acho que você pode rejogar a fase e gastar pontos de energia, mas não sei se isso fornece o item necessário para a criação do item. Eu também não me lembro se Raids custam pontos de energia, mas não seria uma surpresa se custassem.

Enfim, isso tudo é só pra dizer que eu tenho quase nenhum motivo pra jogar esse jogo agora, o que é uma pena enorme! Eu realmente, realmente queria gostar desse jogo. Eu esperava conseguir lidar as microtransações e com as pausas forçadas na história... Mas eu acho que eu não irei conseguir fazer isso. Espero que alguém com mais paciência (E dinheiro pra gastar...) consiga se divertir com Life Makeover, mas eu realmente não vou conseguir entender como isso seria minimamente possível.

i know the devs likely want me to have p2w fomo and feel the urge to grind this that whatever to be top rank or something but unfortunately for them i'm too busy spinning my character around to care. this game is unashamedly cash grabby but it's somehow.. kind of ignorable if you're just like me and using it as a medium to take pictures of your ocs. it's greedy, takes up a lot of space, and has wonky translations and a skip worthy story mode, but it's still at its base level a surprisingly well made game, especially for something that runs on phones. the clothing designs are genuinely very good and the 3d modelling is crazy, not to mention the level of customization for the actual character itself. in general i'm surprised that such a gorgeous unreal engine game can run on my crappy old iphone LOL; though at the same time it seems to have worse optimization on android. it's also not really that time demanding and doesn't make you do any horribly boring grindy tasks for your dailies. in the end.. it's a good gpose replacer and that's all i really want from it

the only things that are really good about this game are the graphics and the fashion function. the story isn’t great and at times is just incomprehensible gibberish, a lot of the ‘gameplay’ just revolves around clicking x buttons for x amount of time each day and mashing together clothes with the highest rating so you can pass a stage, the life-sim stuff feels very barebones and tedious, the game is severely lacking in user-friendly features and the ui is atrocious, and to top it all off it’s grindy and p2w as hell.

but man, it’s so fun just spending hours customizing your character and coming up with new outfit combinations to the point where i can overlook everything that sucks about the game.