More fun than other Sims games, but more hassle as well.
You start the game by creating your posse, the Sims who will inevitably crash on an island after partying too hard. When your first Sim wakes up, he or she is alone and hungry on the first island of the game.
You'll get goals periodically by finding survival guides from previous inhabitants of the islands. While locating your crew, you'll also learn how to interact with the native flora and fauna to feed, clothe, and house yourself. While you have to make things like stoves and beds, you'll have an eternal roll of toilet paper handy for bathroom needs.
The game is fun and exciting for players of The Sims 2 because of the crafting aspect. You gather resources and then you turn them into fun stuff, like a sand-man to talk to, a bed to sleep on, or transport to get to the next island. The number and variety of things to do in the game seems unlimited at times. Personally, the thing that excited me the most was the periodic growth of hair and the need for haircuts. Awesome!
The drawback to the resource-gathering aspect of the game is that it can get very repetitive. You find yourself dashing among the islands, desperately scrambling for more and more hardwood. At the same time, you'll be loaded with bananas. You can assign other members of your crew to gather resources or fish, which makes it a little easier, but no one ever seems to pick up any hardwood. Hardwood is hard.
The biggest problem with this game is that it likes to freeze. I played it on two different disks and on two different PS2s, and I'm not sure if the Wii has this problem. Develop a habit of saving frequently if you play this game, because you never know when the fickle Island Gods are going to strike you down for trying to access something you easily accessed six times in a row previously. I've had the game lock up during saving, too, so be forewarned.
I say to rent this game first because not everyone who likes The Sims automatically likes this game. It puts a very different swing on gameplay and adds challenges that you don't see in other console Sims games. Not everyone finds joy in gathering cotton for ten minutes at a time. But I guarantee that you'll need to buy the game in order to see and do everything that can be seen and done. In the end, technical flaws aside, the game is definitely worth the money.