My Sims Kingdoms was a fun, stylish and charming little game buuut.... a little repetitive.
In My Sims Kingdoms, you control the pace of the game. If you want to blast through the main quest, you can probably do it in 12 hours, without feeling a sense of urgency. I took my time with this game, loot grinding, doing sidequests, and finding all of the secrets. I beat the game in 19 hours, which shocked me. I still had some sidequests to do too. The thing is, I really loved the pacing of the game. I had no idea how long I spent on this game until I beat it and checked the clock. It just rushed by me, and that's a good sign.
I just loved loot grinding, and meeting new characters, reading the wacky dialog. My Sims Kingdoms oozes charm. The music, the graphics, the characters and the writing are all excellent and had me hooked from the start.
There was a few things that annoyed me though, and that was the repetitive nature of the quests. I really wished there was more quest variety. After you leave the 2nd island, you basically seen every quest type. Social, Decorate, Create or Connect pipes. That is basically it, over and over and over again. I wish there was more to it. This would have been an awesome game if it wasn't for this problem.
I still had a blast with the game, even if the quests got old, I still had fun with them.
----------Battle System----------
My Sims Kingdom is kind of a puzzle game, with sim and RPG elements thrown in for the heck of it. It's kind of hard to explain, but I think that's what they were going for.
Basically, you have a magic wand, and you can create puzzle pieces with it. To be able to get these pieces, you must start a quest with a NPC. This NPC usually hands you a scroll needed to complete the quest. A scroll tells you what ingredients you need to create these items. This is where you need to loot grind until you have enough to create the items from the scroll.
Loot grinding in this game involves you to do random "jobs" until you get enough items you need. There are quite a few ways to loot grind, but you do them in nearly every island so the game can get repetitive. You can mine walls with a pick axe. You can shake fruit from trees. You can dig in the ground with a shovel and metal detector. You can fish lakes, ponds and sea. You can pick weeds. You do this stuff on every island, and each one gives you a piece of loot.
Once you have your scroll completed, you can then forever use that item when you are building. To use the item, you must have "Mana". This is basically your magic points. You get mana the same way you loot grind. Sometimes you get it for completing quests too.
When you complete a quest given to you, you gain "King Points". This is like Experience points. When you level up, you gain new items and new islands. However, you max out at Level 5, which kinda sucks.
Most quests are nearly the same. By the time you reach the 3rd island, you basically know everything there is to know in the game. While it was cool and interesting to hook up a bunch of pipes to water plants on the 2nd island. I was sick of it by the 7th.
When you try to build, you are usually bound within a certain area. You have complete freedom on what to put there, and they try to encourage you to go wild. The problem is, you aren't graded on it, so you could put the ugliest piece of crap all in one big pile, and they would still think it's awesome. The only rules to quests is to follow the build order. Each item you use has an element to it. For example, a Flower has a little "bush" element to it. If the quests asks you to make 20 "bush elements", then you can put 20 flowers on the ground and call it a day. While I tried to make the quests look good, it all felt kinda pointless half of the time.
There's really no challenge, outside of maybe the pipe minigames. Even they're pretty easy. I know this was made for younger gamers, but as long as they can read instructions, then they will blast through this game in no time.
----------Characters / Story----------
You get to create your own character. The game's customizer is kind of limited. You can choose between a girl or a boy, but the hair styles and clothes they give you are just not enough. You eventually open up more clothes and accessories during the game, as collectibles, but you don't gain new facial expressions or hairstyles. One thing I liked about this game was the ability to change the pitch of your "Simlish" voice. Another thing that was awesome was the ability to change your character's design at any point in the game.
The game starts off in the Kingdom Island, this is where you are given the "Wanderlior" and the King sends on you a quest to visit each neighboring Island and fix any of their problems. With the Wand, you can create new things by using Mana. You bring your friends Lyndsay, a spunky explorer, and Buddy, the royal Messenger with you on your quest.
Each island is unique, filled with colorful characters. I really enjoyed the dialog alot. It reminded me of Paper Mario in way. While this game was intended for younger games, I found enough wacky humor to keep me entertained. I mostly like the fast paced ADD styled dialog that Paper Mario games have. You could play this game without ever reading a single string of dialog, as it doesn't effect the gameplay. It's just a nice added touch that it's so over the top sometimes.
There's even a dialog tree and it was one of the coolest parts of the game. In some quests, you have to Socialize with a character. To get on their good side, you have to know what that character is about. For example, you have to socialize with a Goth kid. Since he's goth, if you want to get on his good side, don't say happy things to him. To complete the quest, you have to choose all the right dialog choices. Sometimes you have to guess, but other times is fairly obvious. It's just simple choices like "Read Dark Poetry" or "Talk about Flowers". You obviously are going to pick Dark Poetry. It became a little harder later in the game, but you are never really punished if you pick incorrectly.
----------Graphics----------
I really enjoyed the graphics. They hardly pushed any technical boundaries, and there was a few rough spots I wish they ironed out, but overall they were very nice. I really enjoyed the facial expressions and the characters movements during cutscenes or when they interact with each other. The facial expressions are definitely the coolest thing about this game. It seems like each character has ADD. They never stick to a single expression for more than a half a second. It's so over the top and charming that you can't wait to visit the next island to meet the next group of people.
----------Sound----------
I enjoyed the sound. The music was charming, and the "Simlish" or whatever they call it was cute. One thing I hated about Animal Crossing was the annoying cirping of the characters. I usually just muted the voices. You won't even notice the voices in this game so it will hardly matter.
----------World Map----------
You begin on a single island, and once you finish up all the tutorial stuff. The king gives you a map of two islands and you get to choose where to go to next. That's one thing I enjoyed about this game was the sense of non-linearity. Once you got on an island, the quests are linearly, but you never felt rushed to do them. You could stop in the middle of a quest on one island, then jump to another island and start doing quests there. At one point I had 3 unvisited islands just waiting for me, so there were plenty of choice in the game.
You unlock new islands in 2 ways. The first is to level up your King Level. When you help characters, you get King Points, and when you level that up, the King sends you a new map or two. The other way is to progress the game by finishing up islands.
Islands are very very small but easy to travel around. They have about 1 to 5 characters each on them. Sometimes animals live on them too. Nearly each island has a fishing spot, mining wall or trees to harvest. So you basically loot grind the same way on each island, and that really makes the game feel more repetitive than it actually is.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
18:53
You actually beat the game once you max out your King Points and visit the original Island in the game. I wasn't even done with the final Island in the game by the time I "beat" the game and the credits started rolling.
However, once you beat the game, you are presented with a very cool reward. I don't want to spoil it. Then you can do all the sidequests that open up during your quest, scrolls, collectibles or in my case, finish the final Island.
I lost that sense of accomplishment once I maxed out my King Points, so I quit the game after that point (although I did finish the final Island). Most of the secondary quests that open up at the end are kinda garbage though. They basically have you revisit each island and do repetitive chores.