Game Review – Bitlife (Mobile – Free to Play)

Bitlife is a life-simulator game brought to mobile by the developer, Candywriter LLC. With an age rating of 17+, expect adult humour and comical situations as you work through this “choose your own path” styled game.

The aim of the game is, well, it kind of depends on you actually. What do you want to be? What sort of person will you grow up to be? It’s all in your hands through a selection of choices presented to you across your life. Choices that are influenced by decisions you take around interactions with in game people.

You start off each playthrough of Bitlife by pressing on a little sperm icon and creating new life. You get a randomly generated character and some information on them. What is their name, when is their birthday, whether you were planned or an accident, where you live and who is in your family. On the screen you get a few levels to keep an eye on.

Happiness, Health, Smarts and Looks levels are all affected by the choices and interactions you make and therefore how you end up. There are menus too where you can see your assets. Things like cars and houses you accumulate, or not, through your life. There is a Relationships menu where your relationships are listed. Parents, siblings pets and perhaps future partners or children as you move through life. Within this menu, as you get older, you get to interact with these family . Everything from asking for money to spending time with or insulting them are options. Again these obviously heavily impact on your end goals.

There is also an Activities button where you can perform certain actions like Go to the Doctor or Commit a Crime or Play the Lottery. All becoming active at different points in your life, depending on the route you take.

Then we have the important button. The big plus in the middle of the screen forwards the game by up to a year or to the next nearest life event/choice. Meanwhile the screen shows an ongoing script of key events that may impact on your life and choices. Your brother starts school. Maybe your dad dies or your mother takes you out somewhere. As you progress, pop up choices jump in like, the boy next door asks you to go to the movies with him. You can go along with these or choose to not go. Again always impacting future relationships.

Continue your way through life. Learn to drive, go to university, get a job on a career path based on your education so far. Buy a house, have a family and grow old. Or maybe work in MacDonald’s, become a criminal, go to prison and die in a riot. How you end up is completely in your hands and it is fun finding out.

In my last game, I made some wrong choices. I ed the army after spending my youth being rude and abrupt to everyone. I ended up suffering from anxiety, depression and alcoholism before contracting chlamydia after a one night stand. Then, to top it off, I died young with kidney failure.

Bitlife is nice and clean with simple and easy to read visuals. The sound effects are good and work well with the adult humour in the game. The funeral march at your death, the baby cry at your birth. It is detailed and you can tell the developers have put effort into the game.

There are ads as standard. They are pretty regular and are full screen videos that have to play for 15 to 30 seconds before you can shut them. They are annoying as hell and really disrupt the gameplay. There is an option to pay £1.99 to remove ads for good. You can also pay £2.99 to remove ads and gain access to a VIP section. You become a Bitizen and have access to pet sores and exclusive features while also ing the developers. To be far, this game is worth the money so do try to them.

Bitlife is a well made game. One that shows developers that care about the end product. It is fun to play and the supposed adult humour is actually quite funny. I do feel that sometimes your choices don’t lead to where you might think they would. Perhaps there is a bit more random  to the game then purely defining your life through choices. Having said that, that is truer to a life simulator as things get thrown at you that you wouldn’t expect in real life.

With all the crap available on mobile, Bitlife is a very good time killer that deserves your time and a little bit of money too.