MagickCat's Full Review: Urbz: Sims in the City for DS
After one last pathetic whine for "bathroom", my urb with legs clenched together urinated on the floor. Barely ten minutes into Urbz: Sims in the City for DS and I hated it. My urb, a character that I was supposed to be in control of, did nothing but annoy the hell out of me with near constant complaints ranging from hunger to boredom.
I had never played anything from The Sims franchise. I didn't really know much about the games or what to expect, besides what I had stumbled across on some Sims sites...disturbing sites. I was a little reluctant about purchasing Urbz: Sims in the City.
However one preview of Urbz seemed to hint it was similar to a point and click adventure. So I decided to give Urbz: Sims in the City for DS a try.
The Plot
Ever watched Jurassic Park, or how about Back to the Future? Yes? Well, evidently so did the writers of the Urbz. The plot is pretty basic and becomes increasingly ridiculous but still manages to be fun.
Daddy Bigbucks wants to buy up Miniopolis so he can put ticket booths in every building and its your job to stop him as you work your way up the Urbz social ladder.
Your Urb
When you load up Urbz: Sims in the City for the first time you'll be asked to create an urb. This involves deciding on the gender, name, hair style and colour,skin tone and clothing for your urb. After you'll be forced to take a mind numbingly bland personality type quiz. This will decide which of the four rep group your urb fits into. You'll either be a Richie, Nerdie, Artsie or Streetie. Rep groups are cliques that your urb can join in order to gain access to special abilities and items.
It was nice change to be able to play a game as a female character instead of a dude.
A good amount of the game is spent socializing with other urbz in the city. It is one of your urbz 8 "motives". If you don't take care of your urb by maintaining its motives it becomes a major pain in the buttz. Other motives include: hunger, hygiene, energy, comfort, bladder, fun and room.
Basically your urb starts out as a wuss and you have to find toilets and food for it constantly. As you chat up other urbz and become friends with them you gain access to beads called "Xizzles", you can then exchange them at club Xizzle for special abilities like not piddling every 2 minutes. There are skill levels that you also have to build up through exercise and other menial tasks.
Goals
The story is broken into 6 acts or missions and the optional rep missions. Each mission is a series of actions you must complete to advance further into the game. Completing the missions will give you access to more locations, characters, and mini games to unlock.
A lot of the game play involves finding/receiving objects and then delivering them to the proper urb. In a sense its like a point and click adventure but way more straight forward and you don't get to munipulate any of the items in your inventory.
If it weren't for certain glitches completing all of the goals wouldn't be at all challenging. Even with the glitches they're still pretty damn easy.
Once you've won the game by finishing all of the goals you can continue to look after your urb indefinitely.
Controls
Urbs: Sims in the City controls are pretty simple to use. The control pad moves your urb and does a fairly good job of it, though there have been many times my urb has gotten stuck in corners. A button is pretty much used for everything other action and interaction that your urb is capable of performing.
The touch screen is mainly used to access game menus, make selections from the dialogue tree or to play mini games with. You cannot use the touch screen to move your urb.
Graphics
The isometric view isn't distracting and the 2d graphics do a pretty good job representing urban decay in the city. While the graphics aren't stunningly beautiful or hideously ugly, they do the job. I like how the Urbz makes use of animated pigeons to bring the city streets to life. Its a small detail that to me makes a big difference.
Music
I found the music used in the Urbz to be catchy. The theme musics seem to fit the game locations they were used in very well. The sound effects were also good I thought. You can actually hear your motorcycle reeving up when you press the b button and when you scare off pigeons you can hear their wings flapping.
The only problem I had with the music is it would sometimes go glitchy and die after I started a dialogue with a character. I would have to turn off my Nintendo DS and restart Urbz for the music to return.
Glitchy Glitchy
Once I got past the annoyance of having to look after my Urb I actually started to enjoy playing the game, that is until I started hitting into glitches. There was one particular glitch near the end of the Urbz that would actually lock the entire game up. Luckily I was able to go online and find a solution for it.
Another glitch forced me to have to start a new file and replay the entire game. I found more glitches with items disappearing, glitches where I couldn't get rid of inventory items, and glitches with conversations. This got to be pretty frustrating.
I would have to say the best part in the Urbz are the 8 mini games. Though they aren't really difficult they're fun to play especially the simon says like fiddling game.
If it hadn't been for the glitches I would have given Urbz: Sims in the City 4 stars.
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