Sim Animals Massacre

Quickie:
Don't Buy

There are so many games I would like to review, but I’m going to begin with my most recent purchase, Sims Animals.

The Sims games have always been entertaining, but after controlling every bowl movement for a week, I realize there is a real life to live. What is even sadder is I keep coming back to the many Sims spin-offs, like Castaway, forgetting my former disappointment.

Sims Animals features you in a forest under distress and you have to make friends with animals and save the forest from, humans I guess. From how you move around you are more like a god, like in Black and White, and I have to say it wasn’t very easy to move around.

The controls are overly complicated and sensitive, one of the Wiis downsides, and for some reason god, you, needs a backpack where you can hold small animals. That’s right you can carry a animal with you as well as nuts, seeds and other crap.

It’s almost like “Harvest Moon” another game where you care for animals and plant seeds, run a farm, but it’s much more fun for about the same amount of time for any Sims game.

There is also a multilayer feature, not really, especially when one player continuously moves around and disturbs what you are doing, often making situations worse. Even if you zoom out to allow more play room, you still can’t see anything.

Also it has a strong environmental message, humans are bad and only a godlike figure, with a backpack, "Dora the Explorer"?, can save them. However it encourages children to interact with nature...through a video game...honestly just take the kids on a hike, it will cost about the same with gas prices.

In the short run it’s fun for kids, but even my niece completed it in less than a week and was board with it. So really it’s not a repeatable buy, especially for fifty bucks.

I really do believe that the Sims franchise is tapped out because there are only so many ways you can manipulate reality with accessories simulating life. And I will say Sims 2 simulates the most mundane life ever very well, but it’s only fun for about a week and it leaves you depressed because you just drained fifty dollars of your gas money and twenty hours of World of Warcraft playtime where you are at least playing with actual people.