MySims Agents

Is EA's next entry in the MySims series an effective 'agent' of entertainment?

MySims Agents is the latest in EA's attempts to strike gold on the Wii, by taking its massively popular God-game franchise and super-deforming the heck out of it.  With a great dose of personality and a load of puzzles, MySims Agents tries to bring a heavy dose of adventure gaming to the platform, and for the most part, it actually works pretty well.

At its core, MySims Agents is an adventure similar in structure to Monkey Island or Zack & Wiki, discovering items and evidence, interrogating witnesses, and using a fair amount of gadgets to solve a wide variety of criminal cases.  While not perfect, it's a game with a lot of heart and effort, and that certainly helps its case when compared to the rest of the Wii's lineup, and the other MySims titles.

Puzzles elements like hitting your face with a crowbar abound.

In MySims Agents, you play as a character you name and design yourself in typical Sims fashion, and then embark on completing a variety of "missions," generally having to complete a step-by-step path of interrogating NPCs, completing puzzles, and collecting items.  As you play, you can unlock different skins and clothing items for your character, as well as new trophy rewards - some taken from recent EA releases like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge, in a nice nod.

It's repetitive, yes, but the the story and characters are good enough to keep you engaged.  Essentially, your character is an aspiring detective who begins by figuring out rather menial cases around town, until you gain the attention of an evil corporation called Morcucorp.  Its president, Morcubus, is trying to get his hands on a device called the "Nightmare Crown." You, along with your sidekick Buddy and a mysterious girl named Evelyn (who has more than a passing resemblance to Resident Evil's Ada Wong), must be the usual protagonists.

Broken platforming controls are a sore spot for the game.

The real star of the game are the puzzles themselves.  Essentially, there are four different types: relatively simple lock picking and hacking puzzles, more complicated repair puzzles, and brain-bending analysis puzzles.  The lock picking is simple, just move the blocks around with the Wii Remote to get the key from one side of the screen to the other - pretty simple.  Hacking is a bit more unique: players must use the Wii Remote to move a circle through a side-scrolling maze, making sure not to touch the sides.

However, the real stars of the game are the repair puzzles, which involve placing a combination of gears, wires, and belts together in order to fix a specific object.  Also, the analysis puzzles, which involve putting a combination of different colored spheres together to create a sort of molecular puzzle, are brain-teasers worthy of any seasoned gamer.  Many of them bring back memories of classic PC adventure games.  Combined with some smart writing, this is definitely a game as much for the older crowd as it is for the Cartoon Network crowd.

What better place for a vending machine than a snowy mountain?

While the game admittedly doesn't have much to do with The Sims outside of the customization, one area where it does come in handy is through the game's mission mode.  Throughout the game, players can hire agents and send them out on a variety of missions.  Each team can be customized for the mission's specific needs, plus, furniture and other amenities can be added to the different teams' ready rooms to boost stats.  While the team is on the mission, cellular updates let the player keep tabs on things, with limited control over the team's actions.  The missions are a safe enough diversion while completing one's own missions, and actually make for a unique, if simple approach to strategy.

However, the game comes up short in one certainly crucial area: platforming.  To be blunt, the game's jumping is frustrating at best and completely broken at worst.  It has tons of exploitable glitches, but also plenty of incredible cheap jumps and oddball level design choices.  Jumping is controlled via the Z button, which works about as well as one would expect, and feels very loose and lacking polish.  If anything, it really keeps the game from reaching the highs that it certainly has the ability to do.

Is that supposed to be Mother Brain?

The game's graphics are nothing to write home about, being on par with most of the MySims games before.  However, the things that stand out are the same as before, namely the well-done character designs.  MySims's characters are as cute as ever, and it's hard not to go "aww" at the many anime-influenced little buggers.  Music and sound effects are standard, but the usual addition of Simlish will be enough to drive one mad after a while.

Adventure. MySims Agents provides a worthwhile adventure game, with a decent story that kids and adults should enjoy.

Puzzles. The game's puzzles are both unique and challenging, and aren't typical fare for most kid's games.

Cute characters. The MySims characters are still "daww" worthy, and some of them you just want to jump through the screen and hug.  Yes, I know that's creepy.

Customization. There's plenty of ways you can design your Sim, and while you won't do it more than once or twice, the options are there.

Strategy. Mission mode provides a unique way to to pick up more items, and it doesn't impede on the game at all.

Platforming. The jumping and platforming is pretty much broken, with extremely loose controls and a horrible lack of polish. The many jumping puzzles don't help.

Simlish. It's back, and annoying as ever.  Seriously, whose idea was this?  Oh yeah, Will Wright. Perhaps I should shut up now...

MySims Agents is a game that tries to do a lot of things, and be a lot of different games at one time.  At its best, it's a tremendous adventure that hearkens back to classics like Monkey Island, with unique, difficult puzzles and a nice strategy game thrown in.  At its worst, it's a sub-standard platformer that often can be frustrating and overly complicated.  Still, it is the best MySims to date, and a great pickup for those looking for a great adventure.