MySims Agents for Wii Reviews & Ratings by IGN

MySims Agents, the fifth game in EA's MySims catalog for Wii, is also the best of the bunch. The developer has with the title created a more refined and linear experience that revolves around a small-time detective's rise to super agent status and an evil plot centered on a powerful and dark crown. As you explore a variety of unique environments, you will have fun investigating, interrogating and piecing together clues so that you might solve the cases dispatched to you. Meanwhile, both the controls, now more platformer-inspired, and the graphics, spotlighted by a fixed camera, show more polish than in previous MySims outings. Simultaneously, though, Agents succeeds separately from the license, whose primary features -- Sim creation, town customization, unique AI characters -- take a distant backseat to the agent work.

As with all MySims projects, you begin your adventures by creating your character. Sadly, any Sim you designed in MySims, Kingdom, Party or Racing cannot be carried over to Agents, which is too bad. I suppose I understand why, though, since part of Agents' appeal is that you will inevitably unlock new gear and clothes for your character -- thus, if you began your quest with your optimum avatar, those incentives would be rendered moot. The Sims creator is identical to the other games and very basic -- just point, click and cycle between geometry and texture sets until you've designed your perfect Sim. It's very accessible and speedy, pushing you forward into the adventure itself, which is good fun.

Click here to watch a producer walkthrough of MySims Agents

In Agents, you have several tasks. Your primary goal is to take your created character to the tippity-top of the spy business and it isn't long before you own an entire building and have to run it. To that end, you recruit more agents -- Sims you meet in your adventures -- and then dispatch them as teams to solve various other crimes that transpire while you investigate the big missions. There's a small bit of enjoyable strategy to this because all the Sims have unique attributes and some work better together than others. As you evaluate missions, you'll be able to see the chances that your unique teams have of completing their challenges, and consider their odds. Meanwhile, it's up to you discover why MorcuCorp, led by the corrupt CEO Morcubus, is ransacking Sims' homes and stealing their property. And finally, as you investigate, you will eventually uncover his evil plot and will earn all sorts of unlockable items, from clothing for your Sims to furniture and gear for your headquarters, that you can use to enhance yourself and your building. Your attire is purely for aesthetics, but the items you place around your HQ will enhance the abilities of your teams.

It all sounds more complicated than it really is. The majority of the game will be spent exploring areas and interacting with Sims in order to uncover clues. The controls are responsive and allow for more precise platforming, which is lucky since you will need to make precision jumps from time to time. I like the retraveral nature of the environments -- the fact that at the very start of the game, you can walk to a construction zone and see that you'll eventually be able to stack a series of crates and gain access to a ledge just out of reach, but that you're going to need some kind of item before you can do it. To start, you've got a magnifying glass that allows you to satisfyingly track the footsteps of suspects right back to them; a wrench for disassembling parts that can be used to build new items; and a crowbar for opening crates and bashing things. But as you go, all of those items will see enhancements. Indeed, it isn't until three hours into the game do you finally receive an upgrade that allows you to essentially go into build mode, at which point you can go back to the construction zone and stack those aforementioned crates.

Unearthing the truth is entertaining because the investigation process is well designed. You really do interrogate the Sims for clues and then you do the legwork to verify their claims. For instance, when the Mayor says that he couldn't have burglarized a local apartment in the evening because he was eating pizza at the time, you're able to analyze a slice of his leftover pie to determine just how old it is. EA has included four brain-teasing puzzle challenges that revolve around forensics, lock-picking, computer hacking and repair work. They're all really fun and challenging, but my favorite relates to repairs, in which case you have to align a series of cogs and electrical outlets in order to allow a current from one end to the other. To do this, you use the Wii remote's pointer functionality to manipulate the mechanical make-up of the machines. I'm not going to lie: some of these objectives stumped me for 10 minutes or more before I finally figured my way through them.



Although the game is definitely much improved over its predecessors, in my opinion, it does still have some faults. The bulk of the beginning cases are ridiculously trivial in nature. Much of the comedy, particularly from your sidekick character Buddy, isn't very funny. Sometimes the title leads you too much, actually suggesting that you talk to a certain person or visit a specific locale in order to gain more evidence. And the Sim element is by and large downplayed. In MySims and Kingdom, building was a major component. It's not in Agents. The only genuinely influential constructional customization transpires in your headquarters, and even that is flimsy -- you just place items around grids; you don't actually design those items. Meanwhile, the whole system of being nice or mean to Sims is thrown completely out the window. There are a few dialog trees for more aggressive interrogation, but if the first doesn't work, you simply try the alternative and it will.

EA's latest effort dons the same stylized presentation as its predecessors. Characters are blocky by design and the locales they inhabit are overrun by primary colors. It looks very similar to the other MySims games and thus, you know what to expect. That said, Agents' theme and the accompanying characters and environments are far more interesting than the generic lot in the original MySims. You start from the bottom in a city environment and work your way toward snow-filled mountaintops, club-hopping industrial regions and ancient, mountains ruins, to name a few. Each area you visit hides temporarily unattainable passageways and structures -- for instance, access to a mad scientist's locked lab in the industrial zone -- a truth that nudges you to keep searching for clues so that you might retrieve the right information or items to open those zones.

Click here to watch more videos of MySims Agents

The places themselves sparkle with generally crisp textures and strong lighting and particle effects. When you're exploring the snowy mountains, you find yourself engulfed by icy flakes, which fall from the sky. It's all well done, even if the style is inherently simple. Animation is also fluid and there are all sorts of cute little real-time actions that serve no purpose except to prove that you're playing a MySims game. For instance, if you interact with the pizza oven in Gino's restaurant, you'll toss a pie in there and wait for it to cook. Similarly, if you jump into the jacuzzi in the snowy mountains, you'll sit in there and relax as a quick animation plays out. The fixed camera seems like a bad idea -- after all, veteran gamers will whine incessantly the first time the viewpoint doesn't allow them to see something vital -- but it actually works to the benefit of the Agents' experience. This, because the camera pivots and changes angles very dynamically when necessary. And it also shoots the action cinematically, showing top-down viewpoints and panning behind objects to give the impression of scope. The only real drawback to the MySims presentational experience is that, like all the previous games, the framerate dips in wide-open environments, which is unfortunate.

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