SimAnimals Impressions

How do you make two boars fall in love?

It's timeless questions like this that have driven the advancement of science for thousands of years. And the answer, if you're curious, is to get them both hopped up on blackberries, introduce them to one another underneath a shady tree, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen.

The product of this porcine partnership was, unsurprisingly, a baby boar named Stinkette. It's one of the few random names chosen by Sim Animals that didn't immediately get changed. And it fit: young Stinkette proved a perky little porker, prone to starting fights with her fellow resident Batfink the weasel (don't ask). Good thing, too. Batfink could use a little distraction, as he's entirely too fond of harassing the rats that are gradually establishing themselves on the other side of the map.

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Much like prior Sims games on the PC, such tales are the backbone of Sim Animals' appeal. Debuting on the Wii this week, it combines simple controls with a gentle pace and a broad appeal, thanks to the G-rated critters themselves.

A great part of its gameplay, though, focuses on interacting with the environment rather than the animals themselves. To cram that boar couple full of blackberries, you have to grow them -- and to do that, you'll need the right seeds, the right kind of soil, and enough undisturbed time for your bushes to flower and fruit. There's often a great deal of busywork involved in those kinds of processes, but Sim Animals is good at leading players through them with trails of objectives that shouldn't leave you stranded.

At the same time, poor choices early on can lead to chain reactions that take some time to break. Once you've earned a sufficient amount of "happy points" from an area of Sim Animals' forest, you'll unlock a fresh zone. But any unpleasant experiences -- hunger, loneliness, getting eaten -- your animals go through are subtracted from your total. To move on, you've got to build smooth-running ecosystems, and that can be so challenging as to cause some consternation in what's ostensibly a game for kids.

Still, we keep going back for more. Games that lean on busywork -- like, say, the Diner Dash series -- have a nasty habit of proving addictive out of all proportion to their appeal on paper. We'll have to wait and see whether or not that's true of Sim Animals, but so far the fun outweighs the trouble. Just ask the boars.

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