I know that it has been out for the better part of two decades, but over the last weekend, I decided to give Second Life another shot. I have tried a few times to get into this, but it has probably been around 10 years since I last gave this a shot and I was curious what kind of state Second Life was in these days.
How to Download Second Life
You can download the program to play Second Life, which is called Second Life Viewer. To do so – click on the Download button at the end of this review.
The Game Review
What exactly do you call Second Life? I mean it is I guess, technically a video game, but it also has a lot in common with something like Facebook. The idea is that you create your avatar and then live in this massive virtual world. The idea is certainly pretty cool and there are many different worlds that you can go to.
The whole creating your avatar thing is fun and can be as deep as you want it to be. I just selected one of the many default avatars they have, I ended up being this indie rocker-looking dude. You then start your journey in Second Life by exploring and deciding where you want to go.
There are so many things that you can do here that it is kind of hard to know where to start. I had a quick browse and I came across this rock club and I thought I would check it out. So I go to this place that looks like a regular town and I can hear some Stevie Nicks playing which was awesome.
Oh, by the way, you hear all kinds of cool stuff, soon after loading I heard someone making Yoshi noises. The way people take what they are fans of and bring it into Second Life is really cool. While I did not dabble in this there is a very expansive creation suite that lets people create all kinds of cool stuff that they can then decorate their own place with.
If you ask me the whole point of this is to communicate with other people. Pretty much as soon as I started, I had a few messages from people offering to show me the ropes which I thought was nice. I did come across a few nice people, one of whom even offered to take me to this virtual cinema thing. So, I do think there is a really nice element to the Second Life community.
However, with that being said there is a really dark underbelly here. This is 100 percent a game that there is no way in hell I would let my kids play. Some people use this as a place to create their darkest desires and I honestly have no want to interact with these kinds of people, but I would wager that if you spend a little bit of time here, chances are you will come across something that makes you uncomfortable.
There is also a real market going on here! The game does have its own form of currency, but you can use real-world money to top this off. Some people spend crazy amounts of money on property in the game or on buying things to furnish their own little area of the world with.
From a technical point of view, I was shocked to see that the game was not really running any better now than it did when I last tried to play it. The frame rate can slow down to a crawl, it can be glitchy as hell and it really did struggle. It does not matter how good your computer is as all the heavy lifting is done at their end and that is why it struggles quite often to run.
Even though this is certainly not for me. I can see why some people love Second Life and spend hours and hours each day living a virtual existence here. I did come across some decent folks, but I also came across some complete weirdos as well and this was after only spending a short while with the game.
