More animals

After already buying and playing through SimAnimals on Wii, I decided to pick up the DS version to see how it compared. After putting a big chunk of time into the DS version, I can safely say that SimAnimals offers a solid experience that may be a little kiddy, but is definitely a blast to play.

Much like the Wii version, players are presented with a bird’s-eye view of the land in which they can interact with practically any organism in sight, plants and trees included. By making animals in an area happy, more regions will become unlocked. To make animals happy, simply feed them, touch them, and introduce them to species of the opposite sex.

To add a more objective-like feel to the game, players can take on missions, such as collecting pinecones. You are free to do as many as you wish but remember not to take on too many at a time. We certainly don’t want any missions be ignored now, do we?

Happy points

One of the main objectives of the game is to keep your animals happy. Whenever an animal feels cheerful inside, it emits happy points that fill up a bar at the top of the screen. On the opposite side of the spectrum though, animals that aren’t happy emit negative energy that subtracts from the meter. An animal might feel unhappy, because it isn’t being fed enough or isn’t treated fairly.

Besides completing objectives and working towards perfecting your environment, the gameplay remains pretty much the same in each region. The only real difference between regions is the new animals and plants that inhabit it. Due to the large amount of things to do, such as watering plants, petting animals, planting seeds, etc, the game does grow old too quickly.

Controlling your environment

Using the D-pad to navigate the land is a breeze, as are the touch screen controls. Tapping on an animal will bring up info up on it and holding the stylus for a short period of time will allow you to pick up the animal and place it in your backpack.

The controls, however, aren’t perfect. The stylus controls are often imprecise and frustrate to use. Picking up animals can often take several tries, and shaking plants and trees with the stylus doesn’t work all that great either.

Unique

Perhaps one of my favorite things about SimAnimals is its uniqueness. Drawing water with the stylus from nearby water supplies and storing it to form clouds that can water plants is a good idea, as is using the microphone to create wind which can blow seeds off of trees.

Let me just say that SimAnimals wasn’t made for hardcore gamers. The difficulty level of the game is very low and the game can easily be completed in a couple of hours. The replay value is considerably high though since most gamers will probably want to try and complete all the objectives that they missed the first time around.

Made for kids

Visually, SimAnimals offers crisp visuals that are very kiddy. The animals appear as very cute and cuddly beings that any child would want to run up to and hug. On the bright sight, there’s lot of color and variety in backgrounds and in each region. Each area brings its own unique landscape to the table which all look different from each other.

It isn’t hard to see that SimAnimals was aimed for younger audiences. The visuals are very kiddy, the difficulty of the game is fairly low, and the game can easily be finished in a mere couple of hours. When it is all said and done though, there is still plenty of enjoyment to be had with SimAnimals.