Giggles is an adorable woodland creature, a little squirrel looking for a place to live. I feed him, I pet him and I plant his favorite foods nearby. He makes a home here.
Then I feed him to a weasel.
That’s how things go in SimAnimals, in which the player is cast in the role of Mother Nature, encouraging plants to grow, animals to mate and predators to snack.
The Premise: the Game Mother Nature Would Play on the Wii
In the game, players take charge of a forest, new sections of which open up as you progress. Progress is measured by the happiness of everything within your realm. Animals are happy if they have food and company. Plants are happy if they are on the proper soil.
The game always has a number of happiness-creating goals for each region. Often you will be asked to convince an animal to live in a particular part of the forest. When animals show up, complete with cutesy names, you offer them food (by dropping food on them or them on food) to make them love you a little, offer them more food (if they like you a little they will take food from your virtual hand) to make them love you more and then pet them to gain their complete adoration. Using these procedures, you can tame a bear in about two minutes.
If an animal wants to have babies, you drop it on an animal of the opposite sex. Introduce two deer and they will playfully butt horns, fall down, get up and do it again. You can also introduce members of different species to one another just to be friends; if you have a happy squirrel and a happy rabbit they can become buddies. On the other hand, dropping a happy squirrel on top of a happy weasel won’t result in a friendly encounter. Instead, clouds of dust will arise, a notification will tell you an animal is fighting and then another notification will tell you an animal has been eaten.
Animals will also be eaten without your intervention. As you add carrot patches and oak trees, more and more animals will arrive to eat carrots, acorns and each other.
Gameplay: Refashion the World
There are a good many animals in the game, each with their own desires. Beavers, for example, will block a river and create a lake if you can supply them with sticks. As the game progresses you gain godlike powers to tear down trees or hurl lightening, allowing you to help and/or unnerve your subjects.
Some parts of the forest can be radically changed by your actions; planting maple trees on the one grassy spot in a desert environment eventually lead to the revival of a dried river.
Often assignments will ask you to introduce a new species of animal or plant to an area, in which case you can go someplace that has what you need, pop it in your bottomless backpack and transport it to where it is needed.
The Interface: Designed by Monkeys?
That bottomless backpack represents one of the shortcomings of the SimAnimals interface. The backpack can hold all of the animal and plant species in the game. When you click on the backpack you get a list of items in random order, so if you want to find a chestnut or a mouse, you have to scroll past water lilies and radishes and skunks and bull rushes. Items are represented by drawings that, in the case of trees particularly are hard to recognize visually, meaning you have to hover over each item to read the text that tells you what it is. A separate, sortable inventory screen would have been incredibly useful.
Getting around is also quite awkward. You can explore your lands either from a bird’s eye view or from the ground, but it is often hard to get exactly where you want to go. It would also be helpful if you could zoom out further, but apparently Mother Nature can only defy so much gravity.
It is also frustrating that the game will only give you information about your surroundings in a special search mode that pauses the game. Why can’t I get a label telling me what kind of plant I’m looking it every time I put the cursor on it?
The Conclusion: Flawed But Kind of Fun
SimAnimals isn’t the sort of game I would expect to enjoy, yet I found I could happily spend hours planting cherry trees and befriending geese. It is fun to see your animals frolic or hunt and there is a feeling of accomplishment every time a new species of animal arrives (accompanied by a burst of classical music that sounds like something from Peter and the Wolf) or a new section of the forest is opened.
While the gameplay can get repetitive (winning over animals never changes) and the interface is poorly implemented, over all I found SimAnimals was pretty fun. Giggles, on the other hand, might disagree.
