MySims Kingdom Review

Written by: Steve Martin Posted: 19th January 2009

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MySims builds a Kingdom.

MySims Kingdom Details:

	Casual
	Nintendo Wii/Nintendo DS
	EA Games
	EA Games

Out Now

First, Will Wright, brought us The Sims, but people grew restless and tired of having to tell their Sims to use the toilet every five minutes. So, MySims was born from the ashes, an altogether simpler affair, with more emphasis on the creation and decorating of buildings and furnishings with loads of customisation to boot, as well as more time to socialise with the other Sims around you. MySims Kingdom takes the MySims blueprint and simply turns it into a more quest oriented adventure game.

You begin the game on the Capital Island where you are the chosen holder of the position of the Wandolier, this is a highly respected position given by the King and the person entrusted with this is given a magical wand, that can be used to build buildings and objects, with this power, the Wandolier’s duty is to explore the islands of the kingdom and help the local people by completing the tasks they set you. You are not alone in your quest though, your two friends Buddy and Lyndsay are there to offer advice and help along the way.

The objects you can build are determined by the magic scrolls you have obtained or found during your adventure, these state that you will require a certain amount of essences. Essences are found in the world, and some are rarer than others. These essences range from fish (which can be caught in rivers); ore (that can be mined from stone walls) fruit from the trees and even happy and mean essences from socialising with the people around you.

Discovering or collecting essences require mini-game like tasks, such as mining for ore, requires you to swing the remote to tap at the rock face, which will give you a sound and a burst of light to show how far you are from the spot where the ore is, as you get closer to the ore the sound becomes higher pitched and clearer and the light burst is brighter and bigger, once you have found the exact spot, you have to tap away quickly using the remote to get as many ore essences as you can. Other mini-game tasks include fishing and treasure hunting using a metal detector type device. Most of the world is interactive and will give you some form of essences, which are required to fulfil the magic scrolls criteria and this allows you to build more objects and hence complete more tasks.

The tasks are relatively straight forward and usually require you to create a building or fix some apparatus using gears and other tools. The tasks are simple and quick but this stops the game from getting too dull, because the pace is kept quite up tempo. It should be noted that the customisation factor has been downgraded somewhat from the original MySims, you can only use the pre-determined blocks and objects to decorate rather than making your own, but that’s the only fault. The building and decorating process itself is really simple and uses the remote to good effect, imagine using a mouse only better and you’ll have the idea.

Your quest takes you too many different islands that have familiar clichés, Cowboy Junction, Spookane and Rocket Reef speak for themselves, but the characters you meet on these islands are hard to dislike. The actual game maybe a little too short, but it all depends on how much effort you put into your constructions, and whether you go back and improve on them as you progress though the game.

Talking to people will give you new tasks to complete which will earn you a reward and King Points, King Points mean more islands to visit and so the game continues onward. Occasionally, you will need to build up your relationship with a character before they will help you, this is done by choices of topics to talk about which are displayed on the screen and you have to try and guess which ones would appeal to the character you are talking to. It’s actually really well done and quite funny in places, but is limited to appearing only on certain occasions.

Graphically, it’s chunky and reminds me of Duplo bricks (bigger versions of Lego, ask your parents!), but it still looks sharp and the style of the game lends itself to the endearing characters you meet. The facial expressions are also fantastic at times especially when coupled to Buddy’s random ponderings. The islands themselves are filled with buildings (or potential building sites for you to use) and are colourful and vivid. It’s not technically brilliant, but really suits the simplistic nature of the game.
The music is pretty solid and always seems to suit the surroundings, the Sims still speak in their unique Simglish language of random mutterings and sounds, but this helps with the graphics and facial expressions of the characters.

The gameplay itself is quite simple and younger players will really enjoy this, but I also enjoyed it, it’s a nice, gentle game that doesn’t try to be anything its not. Its well written and made me smile, and it’s a welcome change from the complicated simulation games that only reward you after you’ve put in hours and hours of effort. It is supposed to be lightweight and fun, easy to pick up whenever you fancy, but its good enough to keep you coming back too. My only concerns are the longetivity and the repetitive nature of some of the tasks.