The Good Life Reviews

(7 hours played as of time of rating.) A beautiful idyllic simulation. For the $2 spent, it was well worth it. Those paying full price might feel a bit ripped off. PROS: -- Beautiful and varied ocean/island scenery -- Restful music -- Music changes to match tasks/environment. -- Boat handling characteristics are realistic. -- Boat damage scales with speed of impact. -- The challenge of mooring the original boat is fun. CONS: -- Mooring challenges with highly upgraded boats (e.g., 58' yacht) are too challenging. -- Mission challenges during fares are typically intrusive/disruptive to the experience. -- Mission challenges in upgraded boats can be frustrating. -- You never leave your boat. -- Customers (fares) are a little too simplistic models. -- The property tycoon mechanics (what is a good buy?) were not well explained.

For 2$ in a sale totally ok and worth it... I realy dont understand people who have over 30 hours in a game this cheap and give it a bad review... by that calculation every full price title i have less than 1000 hours on is bad? Realy the game isnt polished like WoW but its fun and relaxing... so why not?

Why don't "they" make more games like this? I really like this game a lot! Basically, this is a game about moving to the tropics and taking over a small boat transportation enterprise. You spend most your time transporting people from island to island (for a fee), while acquiring the money to help build your tourist industry empire (via bidding on properties that pay rent). There are also missions that have you skin diving to collect treasure and find downed vintage helicopters, etc... You also have the opportunity to fish (which I have yet to get the full hang of). As you gain money and property, you also gain reputation. And yes, you can buy different boats and so on as you increase your funds (and it is all fairly open ended). The game apparently ends when (you go broke or) you drive all of your competitors out of business. Haven't got to that point yet... :) The game takes a little getting used to as far as the controls, but its smooth sailing (sorry) once you do. There are some minor issues that the developer is on top of and he has already released a patch addressing some of them and adding improvements (literally acknowledging the individual players who suggested them). He is very engaged on the "discussions" board and obviously, is very open to those of us who have made suggestions. THIS is the kind of communication that you hope for from a developer! I'm really excited about the possibilities that might be included and the tweaks that will be made. Because this game is really fun to me .... And I believe it can be even more fun as its further refined. If the game is not going to be undated further, I would love to see a "The Good Life 2."

It's a fun game! I use the mouse, keyboard and an Xbox 360 controller to play. If you like to: fish scuba dive take pictures buy alot of real estate and see returns get chased by pirates in boats with rocket launchers trying to sink you taxi friendly patrons to and from islands and resorts in various boats with waves and weather effects

Game: 8 / 10 - Dev: 11 / 10 This game has so many activities, including: Boating, Fishing, Diving, Photography, Rescue, Real Estate Tycoon and Management! Pros: DEV Support, Graphics, AI (Bids/Ranking System/In-Game Economy), Management, Many Varied Missions, Detailed Boats, Contols (Realism), Diving Scenarios and Map Size. Cons: Fishing Scenarios (Weak), Real Estate Purchase System, Camera During Diving Scenarios is sometimes unresponsive, Pirate Zones (No Designated Area on Map to Avoid) and Repetitave Missions. I really wasn't a fan of this game until about 2 hours of play. I thought that it felt a little shallow. Understand that the main point of this game is to gain REP to increase your income through bids, and ultimately purchase all of the real estate to run the AI out of business due to bankruptcy. After a couple of hours of getting the hang of it, this has become a suprisingly good game. Synopsis: The cons aren't enough to take away from the strong features of the game. If you're a fan of simulation/management games, then you must pick this up! The price is well worth it, even at full $10USD retail. Also, the DEV is awesome. He really listened to the community through forums and quickly fixed a lot of the main issues quickly. I don't think other DEVs put this kind of work in on a Sunday to please the gamers. Cheers! BUY IT!

So fun game so far, slow casual pace with plenty to do. Appears to be a lot to do in order to reach the end. Controls are fine once your used to them and basics are explained well in the tutorial. Visuals are nothing spectacular but are plesant to look at and have found no ingame bugs in my 2hrs of play. Only bug so far is unlocking achievements before you do them. The tycoon part of the game is a very simplified property buying process that only involves money management as to whens the best time to buy. The end game does involve owning all property though so is a nice incentive to pay attention. The reputation part is an important aspect because when you bid on jobs and property you need to pay attention to who else is bidding cause someone with a much higher rep than yours will drive the price up making it tougher to be profitable. Like that part. So if your looking for a casual way to spend your time yet stay engaged this game is a good buy for the price.

The idea for this game is great. It's a game about fleeing the drudgery of urban office work to start a business in the Caribbean, motor-boating, diving, and sailing your way to a different life. However, the reality is that you replace the drudgery of office work with the drudgery of maritime taxi-ing. There's just not much game to this game, even though it had potential. There's no real market strategy to the end game, and beyond the satisfaction of a good boat docking, which takes some skill, the minigames get old really fast. The core features just weren't fun to me, even though I spent way longer than I really should have in order to win.

I really enjoyed my time with The Good Life. I canvased the forum, read reviews and watched a few videos before I bought it on sale at 2.49. The controls take some getting used to and the boats are tad to floppy sometimes but after playing it for awhile I figured out how to catch fish, collect rent, find treasure before using up all the air and in the end I won, literally the game told me that :) I thought this game was made by the company that did Aquadelic GT because the boats and water are very similair but its just a resemblance, Aquadelic GT had more boat sounds like water smacking the hull. At first I was not sure which property to buy and what to focus on but after playing and reading the screens that come up I started buying everything I could afford and completing all the tasks on the trips. I sold off my starter boat thinking I could buy it back or didn't need it but if you want the achievement for owning all boats keep it. I had to start over after like 12 hours because I sold all my old boats to buy property, do not do this as the boats you are not in generate income. I only had a few bugs, the first was the big sport fisherman (purple) has the steering wheel floating over the drivers head, its visible in the picture before buying it and second was the occasional treasure spot on dry land or a photograph target under a building. Otherswise the game was rock solid and I ended up somewhere around 41 on the Hall of Fame. For 2.49 or even 9.99 you would be hard pressed to find anything this entertaining. I would love to see a sequel to this.

I really wanted to like this game. The idea of the game seems very cool. Pros: - The water is just beautiful! Cons: - Game controls are very weird and hard to get used to. - The boats are SLOOOOOW! even a speed boat is'nt much faster than the rickity boat you get in the beginning. - I was thinking there would be so much more to this game but your really just a water taxi for tourists, about 90 percent of the game is transporting people. Sure there are little side distractions, but they are just that, distractions. - When diving the controls are so bad its almost impossible to do anything underwater. - The clouds look like packs of UFOS - The dolfins sound like a bird of prey rather than a sea creature - The pirates are just weird. It looks like they are shooting yellow nerf balls at you. They are terrible shots and it dosen't even affect the strategy of the game much. Just a weird distraction. Having said all of that, I hope the designers keep improving this game, because I think it could be turned into something great. It seems like it just needs a bit more tweaking.

The Good Life description says that this is a game about building a "commercial empire" while becoming "rich and famous". However in reality, the game is so shallow that these descriptions are bordering on false advertising and misrepresentation. I'll briefly explain how the description provided is just barely met by the reality of what the game actually gives you. Do you build a commercial empire? Well, you do have a box that pops up occasionally to allow you to buy property. But that is the end of it, no further interaction from the player. I wouldn't call it management at all since you cannot even set a charge for renting these properties or influence them at all. What these do is function as bonus cash after you taxi clients from port to port. This brings me nicely onto the boating business aspect. When someone says the game is about running a business, there are some key elements required for that to really apply. Budgets, marketing, customer relations and employee relations are the core things which come to mind. Well, The Good Life does require you work to a budget but everything else is absent. You apparently have employees because boats you own, but don't personally use, generate income like your other investments. But again, you don't actually influence any of that. Essentially your 'empire' consists of you personally picking up customers and taking them from A to B. Now this wouldn't really be too bad since games like Crazy Taxi actually made this kind of thing enjoyable but sailing empty waters in largely straight lines gets dull very fast and the highlight of the journey is the challenge of docking the boat without damaging it. One of the biggest mistakes the developers made is to give you the slowest boat in the game at the start and not explain that they can instantly buy a speed-boat instead. The developers should have simply provided the speed boat right away to avoid frustrating players. The description also says that this has exploration, treasure hunting and other activities. Well, since you cannot ever leave your boat the exploration is limited to looking at islands from the coast and while the diving sections do allow you to very slowly move around freely, there is only 1 small map which is used for every diving mini-game. There is fishing, but it is a mini-game that just generates some more cash and isn't profitable or serve any purpose in the larger scope of the game. There isn't any complexity to fishing other than pushing the up and down arrows keys to reel the line in or loosen it to stop the line from breaking. There are other trivial events which happen at random as well. Such as tossing life-preservers to rescue people in the water, the occasional pirate speed-boat for you to avoid and the laughable 'tornadoes' which appear from time to time. But none of these are very interesting. I can honestly say that while The Good Life sounds good on paper; what it gives you is a shadow of what it promises. Paying money for this game would be a big mistake even if it was on sale due to the limited entertainment value and what basically boils down to as leveling system where you invest time and energy to just see your bank balance grow. It lacks personality, a sense of progression or achievement and it just barely manages to even qualify as a game at all, due to how shallow the content is.