Customer Reviews

SimAnimals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I have a 12 and 10 year old. They have been waiting for this game to come out for months! They have now been playing it non stop and absolutely love it. The graphics are truly beautiful and the animal movements are great! They have also played Viva Pinata, and that is what this game reminds me of! You need to do certain things in order to attract animals to you. (Example: Acorns will bring squirrels). Once the animal comes, you earn it's trust by interaction (petting, feeding ect...) Once you earn a certain species trust, it will unlock chances for a different species to visit you, depending if you have what it takes to attract it or not! The concept is brilliant! Not only are you able to interact with animals, it is teaching kids to be responsible by taking care of their animals. I highly recommend this game to ANYONE that is an animal lover! I'm the mom and even I love it! *grins*


UPDATE:
After playing the game for a bit I personally feel that if there was a game that was a mix between Viva Pinata and Nintendogs....this is it!

Players are able to farm and plant different types of trees and plants for your animals. Certain animals will try and eat the saplings and you must protect them if you want them to mature.

As in life, some species of animals eat other types as a food source. Let's say you have a bear cub that eats rabbits, but you don't want him to. You can train him/her as a baby to not eat rabbits, so when he grows up he will be a herbivore (plant eater). It does take a good amount of work on your part to achieve this, but it can be done!

Animals come in a few different colors, but nothing unusual. Bears are brown, rabbits are white and brown ect... If you are the type that love to have pink and purple animals have no fear! There are game missions you can complete that will give rewards that will allow you to change animals to special colors. Different missions have different rewards so there is no telling what all you can get!

I honestly feel that this game will give hours and hours of enjoyment while teaching some good life lessons. It teaches that something worth having may take a little hard work, but the rewards are well worth it! It also teaches you to be responsible, if you are lazy or careless your plants and animals will retire.

All in all I give this game 5 stars, way to go EA games!

Let me start by saying I'm a huge fan of the Sims games. I have been a fan of them since they started making Sim City and Sim Theme Park for DOS. And like many of you, I really like The Sims, Sims 2 and pretty much anything Sim related on any platform. But I was disappointed in SimAnimals (for the Wii). I guess I was just expecting a bit more from the game.

When you start the game, your in what feels like a tutorial mode where it explains what to do step by step. Giving squirrels acorns and petting them to make them your friends. Then after making so many animals happy by befriending them and putting food in front of them, it opens up another area of the map for you to explore.

This is the part where you think to yourself, "Ok, now to really play the game and see what's out there to explore". Quickly I realised that the second spot on the map is just another area of the woods, where you make some more animals your friends by feeding them and petting them, thus making them happy so you can open another area of the map. Through out the whole game you never quite feel like you leave the tutorial mode.

When going to a new part of the map, you are basically just opening up new (usually larger) animals to befriend and new plants to feed them. I was left wishing for more to do in the game.

If I had known the game was this (for lack of a better word) dull and had so little to do in it, I would not have paid $50 for it. I really wish I had a nicer way to put this, because I LOVE Sim/Tycoon games, even the simplest ones, but this one was just not worth the money. I wish I had waited until some reviews were out and realised it was not worth the $[...]. My kids will play it some (8 year old twins, one boy, one girl), but seem to tire of it quickly and move on to something else.

If you want to get this, I recommend waiting a little while and perhaps the price will drop to make it a better price for what you get.

Even though the Wii isn't noted for it's graphics this game takes full advantage of what is possible and the graphics are some of the best I've seen on any Wii game. The animals and their settings with all the plants and trees reminds you of a Disney movie. The movement is a little jerky at times, but not really bad. Being able to interact with the animals is really cool. I played this with a friend's kids, but I have to admit there was an attraction to the game even as an adult.

The animals are wary of you to begin with and you have to earn their trust. Then again, if I saw a big white hand coming out of nowhere I'd be frightened too! You earn their trust by offering them food and interacting with them. You can interact with the plants and trees too, by picking them up and moving them or planting them. You have to take care of them so that they grow and keep the animals from eating them when they're small. You quickly learn to plant the types of things that each animal likes in order to attract them. If you don't make friends with the animals they're afraid of you. One thing that was a little disturbing to me (but the kids thought it was cool) was that the animals can eat each other, just like they do in the wild. So you have to plan their environment and puts plants and other animals around that they are compatible with. The kids wanted to smack the animals too (!) but this makes them afraid of you and you can end up with a terrible environment as well as a good one.

There is enough game play here to keep kids busy for a long time and provide entertainment for adults as well. It is much like the other Sims games where you have control over the environment and can make it turn out any way you want to. If you like the other Sims games I think you'd probably like this one.

All in all, it's a charming family type game and would be a good addition to the Wii library.

We picked up this game to play with our daughter who loves animals but has this love somewhat tempered by an understanding of the cycles of life and death in the animal kingdom. The game starts out benignly, with the player learning how to interact and befriend animals. Skills are picked up and areas become open as tasks are completed. You have many quasi-realistic systems such as animals needing a certain type of food to be successful desiring to live in an appropriate environment and find a mate. Pollution is in some of the areas and can be cleaned by the player. As you proceed, Sim Animals starts to add some strange parts that get more twisted as they play out in the game world.
As mentioned earlier, you befriend animals and they become more comfortable with you. They get used to your interactions so much that you can put them in your backpack and move them to other areas. Cute, a neat game mechanic. You can even name them! Timmy the Squirrel for instance. Then you get missions to get animals to befriend one another. "Get Timmy the Squirrel to be friends with a Deer." A bit strange but manageable in the name of animal cuteness. Timmy's playing with a fawn, awwww!
Now the game introduces carnivores with missions of their own. Suddenly you have a weasel that needs two squirrels to be happy. So what do you do put Timmy and Tommy in your backpack and drop them off in Happy Acres with Mortimer the Weasel? Yup. Bloodless carnage ensues. Our kid is pretty smart but was feeling very manipulated and sad. She even got sad that she could zap the predators with lightning to drive them away! All in all the mix of "realistic" ecology and warm fuzzies did not go over well with us. The pacing of the game was dull and the landscapes and situations were uninspiring. At the same time the game got crazy in a lame way as you have to look all over the map for the bear who's mauling all your little buddies.

Overall a big disappointment for big and little gamers.

Brian

My daughter got this game for her 7th Birthday and today she finally took some time to play and loves it.. that is until the weasel came along and ate 2 of her rabbits and one of her squirrels, she was crying, i felt awful! So if you have a sensitive kiddo who loves animals it might be good to explain to them first about the cycle of life before hand!
Otherwise it is alot of fun, she was jumping up and down every time she got a new animal unlocked!

Ah, SimAnimals. You lured me in with your cuteness and simplicity, but I left you for your ineptitude and... well, simplicity.

SimAnimals for the Wii bears a remarkable resemblance to Viva Pinata for the Xbox 360, as both are essentially "wildlife simulators". You interact with the environment to lure certain species of animals to appear or visit, then you accomplish some other variables to encourage the animals to remain in the area, and then there are other variables to cause the animals to interact with each other. If only SimAnimals also had the graphics, control, storyline or actual gameplay of Viva Pinata, then this would be a nice addition to anyone's Wii library. As things stand, however, this game might have a hard time actually finding a market willing to play it.

The graphics are rather unremarkable, even for a Wii game. I know that the developers could have squeezed some more power out of Nintendo's underdeveloped box, but they didn't have to make it so glaringly obvious. The animations for the animals seem very jerky and out of place, especially if you know what they SHOULD look like.

The gameplay controls are awkward and definitely take some time getting used to. There is no ability to strafe - you must go in one direction and one direction only, then stop and turn if you want your camera somewhere else. It's more frustrating than it sounds, especially knowing that there were enough unused buttons on the Wii remote that could have allowed for one of them to be mapped for a camera strafe. Oh, and a button for actually interacting with the environment, instead of waggling your disembodied hand over EVERYTHING. That got annoying very fast.

I suppose that if you didn't have an Xbox 360 and you wanted a simplistic game for your child that has a chance of marginally encouraging strategic thinking, SimAnimals would be okay. Just be prepared to console the child after a text pops up on screen telling him that his pet robin, Twiddles, whom he has been nurturing and loving in game since the beginning, was just randomly eaten by Fluffs the cat.

SimAnimals is not what I thought it was going to be. The game controls are kind of difficult with having to move around so much and change angle views. It's hard to get a lot of the animals to trust you no matter what you do. Heck I can't even get the regular house cat to trust me and to come to me. I didn't realize when I purchased the game that the animals eat the other animals if you don't watch them. I wasn't expecting the house cat to eat my squirrel. I also wasn't expecting that I would have to keep the animals out of fights with each other and keep them from literally killing each other. Granted I realize in real life that is how the cycle works but I didn't think that they would incorporate it into SimAnimals. I don't buy animal games to watch the animals get hurt and killed. I buy animal games because they are cute, fun, and entertaining. The gameplay also gets a little boring after a while when you can't get anywhere with it.

I gave it three stars because the graphics are awesome and the animals look so real. I could also get the squirrels to trust me so that was another plus. lol.

Overall SimAnimals isn't the game I thought it was going to be. The previews are a lot better than what the game ended up being. Again I am a HUGE animal lover and animal game lover and I was disappointed with this game.

I purchased this game for my wife, who enjoys sim-type games in general. She did like the game for the most part, but I could tell watching her play that she would get frustrated almost every time she played, which to me is not a good sign for a game that by appearances should be relaxing and fun to play. The biggest issues I see watching it are:

1) bigger animals eat smaller animals with too regular a frequency. Now I understand that's nature, but you don't get that many animals in at a time to start with. If you are trying to complete a task that requires 3 ducks to live in an area, for example, you are lucky to even get 3 to move in. And if a bear, wolf, or fox decides to eat 1, 2 or even all 3 ducks, well then you're out of luck. And trust me, they eat them, and lots of other smaller animals, way to often. I understand from other reviews, etc., that somehow you are supposed to "train" the bigger animals not to eat the smaller ones, but I failed to see how that could be accomplished. Yes, the game does tell you when 2 animals are "fighting" and one is about to end up down the others gullet, but we have yet to figure out how you are supposed to save said soon-to-be-dinner animal from its inevitable fate.

The same problem can almost be said for the plants and trees you are supposed to grow. There are a lot of tasks requiring plants and trees to be grown from seeds, but many of the animals apparently like the tasty new growth and will gobble it up incessantly as you try to get new plants and trees started. In short, everything is hungry. All the time. And even if you feed things with stuff you've stored in your backpack or picked up off the ground, they'll still be more than happy to go eat that small critter/tree sapling over yonder for desert.

All that said, she did plug away at it on a nightly basis and, through determination and constant vigil to keep animals and new plants alive, she did manage to make it through about 87% completion of the game, until...

2) A few glitches apparently exist in the game as well, one of which ended up catastrophic. A couple of the tasks would never complete, which should in turn unlock additional tasks and rare plants. By all appearances all conditions of the tasks were met in the area, but no matter what she did, the tasks would never show completed. This would, of course, prevent her from finishing the game completely. But that turned out to be irrelevant anyway, as a few nights ago she saved the game as usual, and when it went to the start-up screen after, like it always did before, her saved game had disappeared. Normally it would show the save in a saved game slot with the percentage completion, but poof, it just wasn't there any more. She restarted the game, etc., to no avail. I looked in the data section of the Wii and the saved game does still appear there, but the game won't recognize it. So apparently for some reason the saved game became corrupted and the game can no longer read it. Considering the game was somewhat frustrating in the first place, and then to have the saved game lost after several hours of game play, was really irritating to put it mildly. She put the game away in disgust, and I am highly doubtful she will ever pick it up again. Can't say I blame her just from watching it, she has other games she can move on to that I have to believe will be a lot more relaxing than this one turned out to be.

I love Sims games, but this one is by far the worst I've ever played. Compared to other sim games, this one is very shallow in terms of the plot and goals. It's highly repetitive (as other reviewers have described as well) as you have to feed and pet animal after animal, area after area, without much else to do. I gave up halfway through because it was becoming so tedious. The graphics and navigation movements are quite crude considering the year this was put out. Also, the rough way the controls are set up to accomodate using the Wii controller (and the wrist movements you have to make to collect and plant seeds, and pet the animals), your hand and wrist can become painful and sore, almost like carpal tunnel.

If you are looking for a cute Sims game, My Sims Kingdom is 10 times better. If you are looking for a fun animal sim game, Viva Pinata is unbeatable.

Hi I'm a ten year old Wii lover and I just want to say, "This game is great!"

Even though bears, raccoons, weasles and wolves can kill other animals, if you collect water and drop it on them, the fight will stop. Overall a very fun game!