Although ex-ButtonSmasher writer Konstantinos has written about MySims Kingdom in the past I thought I’d give my own take on the game while giving you a little more information as we near its release date. As you may have realised by some of my posts here I’m a big fan of any game that allows you to express your creativity and The Sims franchise has always slotted neatly into that category. Also, although it pains me to admit it, I’m partial to a cute looking cartoony game every now and again (and how can that be wrong when some ‘cute’ looking games allow you to slice heads off their shoulders?).

Anyway, MySims Kingdom is the follow-up to the hugely successful MySims - which just goes to show that anything with the word ‘Sims‘ attached sells like hotcakes. Ok, so in itself it wasn’t a bad game but it was far more geared towards the casual crowd than the normal Sims games, if that’s even possible.  EA know that casual games sell and fill their neat little pockets with shiny gold so they aren’t about to add too much depth and difficulty on systems owned by everyone and their mum (although the Wii and DS could do with some more decent hardcore games). However, this sequel does somewhat expand on what MySims had to offer, as the promises of unleashing your creativity didn’t exactly live up to their name. Now you may say that unparalleled creativity is too much depth for a casual game but Spore managed it and, from my current experience, that game sacrificed a lot of gameplay-wise depth to remain attractive to the casual crowd.

The aim of MySims Kingdom seems to be a lot like Animal Crossing, and by this I mean give you plenty to do everytime you switch the game on. The aim is to help the king rebuild his kingdom, but unlike The Sims there’s also a storyline so you won’t really be making up your own. While you’ll be able to build your own things like in the previous installment the creativity controls largelly extend to solving puzzles around the kingdom, such as making a windmill work again by connecting gears and pipes. To do any building you’ll need something called ‘esscence’ so, in a way, this is the games limitation as it won’t allow you to grow crazy like The Sims would. Thankfully, the kingdom is big enough to add some much needed depth to the game and you’ll most likely never be stuck with something to do across its various islands, until you’ve completed the game of course. The storyline is actually a more structured approach to the franchise, and what we’re actually seeing is the opposite of a game like Spore or The Sims - the dumbing down of the creativity but, hopefully, providing more structered and enjoyable gameplay (just read some of the reviews of Spore saying that the tools in the game are excellent but the gameplay doesn’t quite match them).

I see myself as a hardcore gamer - which obviously should be the case if I take the time to write two blogs about games - so, in the end, maybe I’m not really the target audience for this game However, Nintendo continues to insist that Animal Crossing is for both hardcore and casual gamers so maybe MySims Kingdom can also appeal to both audiences, even if it’s just a slimmed down ‘cute’ version of its big brother.

Or maybe I’m just talking crap, but I’ll put that down to not feeling too well today. Let’s face it though, I do harp on about the casual/hardcore divide a bit too much don’t I? Maybe I’ll try to limit that in the future…

…maybe!

Anyway, you can find out if I’m talking rubbish sometime this autumn on the Wii and Nintendo DS.