MySims (Wii)

Ideal for younger players, MySims in a good but not great "sandbox" style game.
1/30/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Similar to The Sims games on the PC, decorating your home on the inside takes more patience and care, but you'll acquire furniture, appliances and many other objects to make your house a home. You'll also need to construct a workshop, where you'll be building and customizing new objects soon enough.

You'll spend plenty of time helping townsfolk build structures or items they need, beginning with the mayor who asks you to build her a podium in your workshop and deliver it to her at the town hall. Soon you'll be designing and building everything from jukeboxes and pizza ovens to laboratories and pirate ships. You can stick to the blueprint or indulge in a little creative expression, but you'll likely want to stick closely to the template for the first few items you're building. When building, you'll use the Wii remote to move blocks around a grid-like interface by following the colored icons.

The third major gameplay mechanic is called Essences, which range from apples and stones to hearts and diamonds to trouts and crabs, and you can collect them in a myriad of ways: harvesting them from the ground, trees or water; socializing with your new friends and catering to their needs; and of course by building items. Essences can help you build and paint special items, depending on the types of Essences found. So long as you have enough Essence in your Sim's backpack, you're good to go wild.

While personal comfort (hygiene, hunger, bladder, energy and so on) and social interactions with other Sims were key in past Sims games, it seems to have taken a backseat in MySims, which places a stronger emphasis on building objects and collecting and using Essences. This might be fine for some, but it felt like a watered-down version of what made The Sims game so great to begin with -- so why bother calling this a Sims game at all (besides the obvious branding-for-profit reasons)?

Boosted by high production values, MySims can, however, be a fun diversion for the Wii, between its generous customizability, open-ended sandbox-style gameplay and collectible component -- but fans of previous Sims games need be aware this is a very different experience, for better or for worse. At best, younger players might want to rent the game for the weekend to see if MySims weaves a similar magic spell as the addictive games that came before it.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.