SimAnimals, the latest Sim video game from Electronic Arts, lets you explore a vast forest of wild animals and make it your own. With over 30 species of animals spread out in the woodlands, swamps, and more, this game will reveal secrets about the wilderness and teach you what it takes to survive in the wildlife.
Use the Wii remote to interact with dozens of animals. View larger. |
Plants and animals will habitat differently depending on your actions. View larger. |
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Beavers can create a dam to trap water. View larger. |
Engage with Your Favorite Animals
Whether you like bears, foxes, badgers, squirrels, or owls, SimAnimals lets you touch, move, and play with them and other animals from the Northern Hemisphere. Using the Wii remote, you can pick an animal up and bring him to his friends, feed a bear, and touch just about everything in the forest, including trees and flowers.
Depending on how you treat the animals, they will either trust you or fear you, which in turn will affect how they evolve. How the forest ends up is up to you, but remember that you can only unlock new forest areas and explore into areas such as the swamps or castle ruins when the animals are happy. There are a total of 11 areas that need to be unlocked one at a time.
Interactive, Dynamic Environment
All of the areas in the forest are connected, and what you do in one area will cause changes to happen in another. For example, if the beavers build a dam, it will create a lake on one side of it while removing the water on the other side. This in turn can create a large amount of ducks in the lake, but plants that needed water down the river might die out. You’ll have a lot of fun watching all these changes in the world occur in real time.
Solve Different Challenges and Discover Forest Secrets
SimAnimals provides players with different challenges to solve in order to live happily in the forest. You’ll have to figure out which plants grow better when near water, which foods different animals need to live near, and more. As you get further into the forest, you’ll meet animals with special abilities and one-of-a-kind objects.
Play Together in the Forest with your Friends
You can have up to three other friends to play with you in the forest, interacting with the animals all at once. Your idea of a good forest might conflict with someone else’s, and you’ll see interesting results every time you play.
User Ratings and Reviews
2 Stars Game is probably fun for kids
The game is pretty boring. It is the same concept over and over.
All you do is the same at every area. It works like this:
You are new to an area and have to grow plants to draw an animal in.
Once the animal is in you have to have it mate. Then when there are more of the same species, some predators come in. You have to let animals eat and mate faster then the predators can eat them so you can advance to the next level. Each level you deal with bigger animals and bigger predators.
Whether you play with mice or elephants, the idea is exactly the same.
This is the same as World of Warcraft. In WoW you have to kill things that make you stronger so you can kill stronger things. The ratios will be always the same, so the gameplay never changes from level 1 to 1000.
5 Stars Great game!
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!
2 Stars Unintentionally creepy
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
3 Stars I LOVE Animals Games BUT…
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.
4 Stars Fun but made my daughter CRY!
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!
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