I’ll never be a professional gamer, though at one point in my life, I thought I could go pro in Halo. As a teenager, I drove my car around the country to watch Major League Gaming events. I fawned over professional play on ESPN. I practiced, a lot. I wanted to be so good at Halo that everyone screamed my gamertag—sweetpotatoes—in a packed venue.
But I was never that good. In fact, I was never really good at all. Sure, I could carry my team on Halo 3’s multiplayer queue, but that’s about it. Playing with anyone who actually knew what they were doing yielded poor results on my part. But now that I’ve played Esports Life, a professional gaming simulator by Youtubers Life developer U-Play Online, I’m extremely glad I was never able to GIT GUD. If being a professional gamer is anything like it is in Esports Life, I want no part of it. Esports Life: Dreams of Glory is a bad video game.
Esports Life begins with your character, an esports newbie, being invited to a major Master of Champions tournament. (Master of Champions is essentially a poorly designed version of League of Legends.) Shit’s hype, you guys—or at least, it’s supposed to be. There’s not much to do at the tournament, besides chat with an off-brand Tracer cosplayer in the lobby before your character receives the wisest piece of advice you’ll get inside this bad, bad video game: Don’t go pro, at least not in Esports Life.
Yes, a non-playable character—an esports pro called Malatute—actually warns your character about becoming an esports pro. “Don’t do it,” he tells you. “It’s really stressful and you’ll retire early.”
I wish I took his advice before continuing this video game. When you enter the venue, you can only really move the camera around slightly as you take in the smashing spectacle of whatever this esport is. Esports Life segues into a dream montage where you—yes, you—lift the golden trophy over your head in esports glory.
And as soon as it begins, you’re back in your bed and your weirdly hot mom is waking you up for school. Of course, she doesn’t believe in your esports dreams, and she forces you to go to high school. This is where Esports Life’s grind begins. The game consists of a bunch of menial tasks, like matching graphics, all of which increase the skills you’ll need to be the best gamer. For a large part of the game, you’re switching between clicking on bad guys—that’s training—and talking to people at the LAN cafe—that’s, apparently, destressing. When you’re not doing that, you can watch people “play” video games on off-brand Twitch, where you’ll have to match emoji sequences. (This is supposed to be a way to train your character to be better at video games. No, it doesn’t make sense.)
The best part of Esports Life is going to the local Burger Den, where you can eat food and kiss girls. There’s also a mall to visit, where you can watch movies and change clothes. None of these elements are particularly fun, but I can at least appreciate the variation in my character’s extremely mundane life. Unlike my own high school experience, at least my Esports Life character has friends. (Just kidding. I had friends. Really… I did.)
Esports Life’s story continues to roll out, with your pal Mike—that one who invited you to the tournament—looking for teammates for your esports team, while both of you continuously get bullied for being bad at video games. And that’s your motivation for getting better, actually. The bully stole Mike’s laptop and you’ll have to beat the bully at Master of Champions to win it back. And because you are dumb highschoolers, you decided to take on the challenge instead of just informing your school’s principal of the theft.
Outside of the stunted story, Esports Life is bugged. Loading times are ridiculously long and far too often. These are both problems that the developer seems willing to fix. On Dec. 21, Esports Life received a fairly big update that added the ability to skip the boring minigames and just generally speed up the process of progressing through the game. Also, your mother’s presence has been reduced throughout the game—the initial story had a lot of screen time for mom.
Likewise, Esports Life does have two new esports teams added to the game, but I’ve yet to discover what impact these have, aside from their presence in the initial tournament montage. So far, there are fan favorites TSM alongside Fnatic, Millenium, Team iMPacT, G2 Esports, PSG Esports, and Team Heretics.
Esports Life: Dreams of Glory is just part one of the Esports Life series, so there’s more esports simulation to come in due time. Lucky us.
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