started: 3/2/23 | finished: 3/3/23 | reviewed: 3/3/23
played on: wii (physical) | release year: 2009
i found out about simanimals while i was on some music streaming site looking for something for somebody. i saw the soundtrack for simanimals and i was like "theres a sims game with animals!?!?" then later that day i found the ds version at a thrift store :O i played it for a little bit and it was neat. but what i really wanted to check out was the wii version, so i got a copy off ebay. i was utterly enchanted by it for the first hour or two of gameplay. i had so much fun petting and feeding the animals and solving problems to unlock new areas. i took my time doing side missions too. it reminded me of games i loved as a kid, namely world of zoo and viva pinata. however, maybe 3/4 of the way through the game (its a pretty short game), i suddenly got very very bored with it.
this is an interesting experiment from ea, and not something they would make nowadays. its a very cool idea!! but it falls flat in a lot of places. namely, the sims is all about building and customizing your house and watching the life journeys of your people/pets. characters in the sims, even the animals, have distinct personalities and unique interactions and relationships with other people/animals. in simanimals, the animals dont have any personalities at all. really. the only interactions they can have with other animals are "greet", "frolic", "hunt", and "mate". getting animals to like each other enough to mate takes about 20 seconds. there isnt much reason at all to get attached to an individual animal since theyre pretty much all the same. plus they eat each other often.
the actions you can do, like petting and feeding animals and playing a couple minigames, are fun at first but you do them a LOT and they get old. the only customizing of the world around you you can do is planting trees wherever. so yeah. i enjoyed this quite a bit especially in the beginning for the sheer thrill of "this is a virtual animal game on the wii ive never seen before and i would have played this for hours and hours when i was 7", but by the end i was glad to move on.
score: 7/10