The Sims 2

"Falls wide off the mark"

I didn't have high hopes for this game at all. Considering the resources the PC game needed at the time, I treated the announcement for the console version with a great degree of scepticism, and it seems that scepticism was well founded. Even though the flaws in this release turned out to be somewhat different to what I had anticipated.

Firstly, there's the create-a-sim screen. It borrows a lot from the PC game, but it introduces a new element that really should have been in the PC game too. The clothes are, to a certain extent, modifiable, and unlike the PC version, it is possible to mix and match shirts, pants, shoes and accessories and then some. Unfortunately, whilst this seemed like a great idea on paper, it seemed that its execution is a little flawed. For one thing, the player isn't presented with a lot of choice, and not all clothing options come with modification options. Also, unlike say The Urbz (which did the whole create-a-sim thing better IMO), there is no direct way to modify the colour schemes on the clothing textures. The result? Some incredibly hideous and garish colour schemes that the player has no control over. The less said about the textures themselves, the better.

Another issue here is the number, or lack of, of unlockable clothes and accessories. To put it bluntly, they aren't worth the hassle of playing through the game for.

Now onto the game itself. There will be no more comparisons with the PC game here, as it becomes obvious that The Sims 2 for console is a completely game.

Like it's predecessor, The Urbz, Sims 2 is mainly goal-orientated. There is a free play mode, but it's very limited from the off, because the better objects are locked, and remain so until you go through Story Mode (or cheat). This also means that there isn't a lot of freedom in what you can do in the game. There's no time to admire the scenery because on-screen messages keep popping up to force you do something story-related, like getting a job or interacting with other sims.

Which brings me to my second gripe. Interaction. You get the choice of controlling a sim directly, or using the "old school" approach of moving a cursor around the screen with the controller. The problem is, both methods are incredibly flawed.

For instance, in direct control mode, you have to navigate menus to do something that should only take a button press. Example? How about reading a book. "Simple!" I hear you cry: "Just walk up to the bookcase and choose read book, right?" Wrong.

You walk up to the bookcase, hit X, navigate through a menu to actually select "bookcase" (because the game's decided that everything within a ten-mile radius of your sim is reachable for some reason), then choose "grab book". A little bit of loading later and your sim just stands there book in hand. Now what?

Well, now you actually have to tell your sim to READ it! Go through the menu again (this time locating the BOOK from the list of objects within a ten-mile radius of your sim!) and your sim will stand there whilst the game loads the relevent animation. Finally, your sim will stutter (not walk) all the way to a couch or chair, sit down and read. Of course by the time you've done that, your sim's probably gotten a little hungry. Cursor mode is no better. Unlike the free-moving cursor in The Urbz, here it is firmly locked to the grid which makes it awkward to move it around.

One of the selling points of TS2 for console is the ability to use ingredients to make different types of food that have different effects on your sim (or others who dare to eat it!), but to be honest I couldn't be bothered pressing buttons at random, trying to get the game to just take a moment in between loading thumbnails and actually getting my sim just to make a simple meal. This was even further compounded by trying to clean up the mess your clumsy sim had made whilst eating. Want to make your sim clean up? It's back to those painful menus again.

And this is the real problem with The Sims 2. Most of the time, when you're not being harassed by on-screen messages telling you to get a job, you are being hassled by annoying menus when you want to do something as simple as take out the trash or have a shower, every time, when you finally do find the right option, being forced to wait whilst the game loads the right animations and then proceeds to do as you told it to fifteen minutes ago, with a second-long audio lag behind the animations.

But it gets worse. There's no autonomous conversations between your sim and another. Each conversation has to be initiated yourself which sort of renders Free Will irrelevant. There's never a situation where a group of sims can chat together, only situations where conversations have to be one-2-one. No sim will come up to yours and start a conversation. Even The Urbz managed this.

The simple fact is this game just isn't any fun. The animations can be funny, but for the wrong reasons, and some of the objects in the game should be fun to interact with. But they aren't, because of the clunky menu and interface that you have to wade through to get anywhere. At the end of the day, you simply lose interest and quickly look to the internet for the cheats just to see if the locked objects and clothes were actually worth playing the game for, and in truth, they're just not.

A real disappointment, and a real shame too.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 10/16/06