Despite sounding like an alt text for an image in HTML (I know because we’re fancy like that over here), City Life Game with Friends is actually EA’s latest foray into the mobile space, and, more importantly, it’s the latest iteration of Project Rene.
Now, you probably don’t need an introduction to the not-The-Sims-5 game since you’re here reading this, but Iwan’s deep dive should get you up to speed just in case. It’s recently entered in Early Access as a short playtest on Android in both Australia and the Philippines, and lucky for me, I can get my hands on it simply by living in the latter.
With that long preamble over, what exactly can you expect from this upcoming co-op-centred sim, and what does it actually mean to live a city life with your friends?
Leaving on a jet plane
City Life Game With Friends starts off with you at the airport, waving goodbye to your friends as you set off on an exciting new adventure. Breathless and beaming, you catch a plane to Les Fontaines – a place where you can be anyone and start over should you so wish – and it’s a pretty ingenious way of letting you customise your character with everything from your pronouns to your physical appearance.
You’ll do this by picking from a healthy choice of hand-drawn icons, all presented via text that’s almost as if it’s telling a story in third-person – you with your bags packed and ready to go and the world just yours for the taking.
Catching your reflection in the window determines your hair colour, while checking your watch lets you pick your skin tone. As you pass the time on the commute, you’ll get to pick your main hobby, which, given the limited number of choices, is a tad underwhelming at the moment.
You’ve got your sketchbook, your headphones, and the option to chat up your seatmate on the train – something the introvert in me immediately ignored. And given I can’t draw if my life depended on it, I picked the headphones…which apparently made me a musician.
Now, I’m stuck with being an aspiring performer who needs to boost my musical meter to fulfil my apparent lifelong dreams, which is where the city missions come in.
Kicking off your City Life (Game) With Friends
At Plaza de Poupon, you’ll need to tick off a bunch of items on your to-do list, including feeding pigeons from a bench and looking for a secret gnome statue that nobody actually knows where to find.
You’ll have tabs at the bottom of the screen that indicate different meters for keeping your Sim happy, whether that’s grabbing a bite to eat at a vending machine or simply sitting all by your lonesome and staring into space with an existential crisis (an option I usually take myself).
There’s not much to do around the plaza at the moment (which I understand considering the playtest will only run until tomorrow), but perhaps the most interesting aspect of Project Rene – er, City Life Game With Friends – is that it supposedly revolves around playing with your pals. And right now, even if your online besties aren’t around, you can still join a play session with others and goof around in the plaza should you so wish.
Making multiplayer memories
There are only two multiplayer activities at the moment – joining a cafe shift or starting a Decorate Together session. The former will have you working for the man to earn some money, while the latter lets you tinker around in a shared space as you spruce it up with your friends. You can then take photos and vote for the best ones when you’re all done.
As for the Cafe Shift, you’ll be taking orders, handing out croissants and serving up hot cups of coffee to anyone who might ask, and at the end of your shift, you’ll be rewarded based on how well the customers think you did. It’s not the most adrenaline-pumping activity, but it does make you magically change into a barista outfit and give you free food.
I somehow managed to sneak a piece of bread out after my shift and ended up holding it for the rest of the day to munch on when my hunger meter got low.
Finding actual friends in the city
Of course, the most appealing social aspect here is that you get to randomly interact with people in the plaza, whether that’s telling bad jokes or flirting with them relentlessly. Nothing progresses at the moment – you can simply join conversations to make people like you, or you can show off your feels with the emoticons you can use in conversation.
You can also switch up your look at the clothing stands littered throughout the plaza, which is where all my hard-earned money went from working at the cafe. You’ll also need to fill up your hobby meter, and because I was apparently a performer, I had to busk on the sidewalk belting out tunes off-key just to fill up that meter. Needless to say, it got very annoying very quickly, not just for me but for every other poor soul standing around me, I’d imagine.
Overall, City Life Game With Friends is a totally chill sim in the making, with lots of kinks it needs to iron out first before its official launch. It’s far from feeling polished at the moment – I did encounter plenty of laggy beats and fat-finger problems – but I’m pretty confident that EA is going to take all of our playtest experiences and collate it into one mega-file for improvements once the test ends tomorrow.
In the meantime, you can always check out the Businesses & Hobbies pack while you wait!
