MySIMS! NOW WITH KINGDOMS!! DA DA DAAAAAAA!!!! {SILENCE}

Developer: Electronic Arts Publisher: Nintendo Release Date: October 28th, 2008

Now, I know what you’re thinking (or should be thinking for the purpose of this opening) ‘this game came out in October, what’s the deal?’ Well, honestly I haven’t played a SIMS game since ‘The Sims‘ on my PC when I lived with my ex girlfriend (you know who you are). So I played a while and got ready to write this up. Then I’m at my buddy’s house and his kid has a copy of the first MySims. So I thought I’d try it out.

I’ll tell you right now, they’re almost the exact same game. But I’ll do this review as a standalone just to be fair. Cool?

Alright, here we go.

The storyline is more or less just a set up for the gameplay. The kingdom you currently reside in has been burgled. Yes, the whole kingdom. So as the long lost but not forgotten home-comer, it is your duty to find a way to build things back to their former glory. So go get ‘em.

The pacing at the beginning is slow as you learn who’s who and how you’re gonna get business done. Creating new objects for the kingdom requires two essences gathered from local objects with the ‘Extractor’. Then it’s just a matter of feeding a combination of various essences into the ‘Synth-o-Tron’ to create the desired object. Repeat until your kingdom is restored and the burglar is exposed and savagely beaten – oh wait, that’s my version.

Discovering the various combinations takes more time than you would expect. You can choose the ’shake’ minigame or have the game do it for you. Either way, getting the desired effect is a task in itself. How many times did I get a cutesy fountain or bush. Seriously?! How many pink bushes or lemon trees do you need in one kingdom?! How about a fence? No, I need more than one piece of fence...aaand I get another bush. Uncovering useful essences comes with the completion of residents’ missions and discovering a new area of the kingdom. This exploration keeps the game going for quite a while actually.

I just wish I could have cut to the chase during the whole ‘creating objects’ process. Gathering everything together and figuring out the right combination of essences gets old. Quick. It occurs to me that, for a portable game, a streamlined process could have been useful. Here’s a list of what I need, can I get it? Of course this would have shortened the play time by half.

Which would have made MySIMS Kingdom a five-hour game. Dear me.

As a break to the impending tedium, you get minigames – the saving grace of all things repetitive. Tennis, snowboarding and vegetable sales are among the roster. And in the grand tradition of all minigames, they range from amusing to annoying. I will say that the stylus does its job admirably. It doesn’t take long before you find yourself hunched over scribbling furiously. Which is the most fun I had in the game incidentally.

And that brings us to controls: par for the course all around, which is not a slight in any way – really, how many DS games have you played where they cant even get the stylus controls right? It kills me. My favorite aspect is the choice between stylus and D-pad. More games need to implement this whenever possible. You listening people?!

MySIMS Kingdom is vibrant and colorful with polygons there as needed. It is unfortunate, however, that the graphics don’t fit into the ‘interesting’ category, but the job gets done nonetheless. It would be nice to see a game like this push the DS’ capabilities. But hey, maybe someday.

So is this a bad game? Kinda. It’s more for kids in my humble opinion. Most adults will attempt to re-wrap the case and return it to Wal-Mart after the first couple of hours of play. If you have any choice at all, get the Wii version instead. It is far better. But if you’re looking for something time consuming for your child’s DS and you don’t already have MySIMS, then go for it. Unless your kid already has MySIMS and just has to have this, which is the goal of all uninspired sequels I suppose.

Overall: 6 out of 10

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