The Sims 2: Castaway (Nintendo DS) Review

Whilst we like The Sims well enough (and always will), this just doesn’t feel right. It is very slow paced, very boring and there is very little to do. Once you have designed your Sim and mucked around on the island a bit, you have pretty much seen all there is to see and done all there is to do. This is only about thirty minutes into the game. So, that leaves you with an hour of vague tedium and repetition to cope with. Nothing is helped by the clunky use of the DS. All movement is done by tapping your Sim around the screen. They ponderously walk everywhere, it takes them about a day to find food and come back (by which time they’ll collapse anyway because they’re too tired to eat) and most of the tasks are about as fulfilling as eating dust.

There are some neat moments. When you light a fire you rub at the screen and blow into the microphone to make flames, when you catch a fish with your spear you ‘chuck’ your stylus at the fish you want to catch. It might be obvious, but at least the developer has made a concerted effort to make the very most of the hardware. All the menus in the game navigate through the stylus and most of the tasks you have to do involve some use of touch-screen shenanigans.

In terms of graphics, Castaway suffers the same fate as a number of 3D DS titles. It just looks rough. Whilst the animation is clean and varied enough, all the colours are vaguely horrible and the detailing on the characters and surroundings is hideous. What’s most gutting is how the characters in the game lack any sort of personality. It might just be us, but we really couldn’t give a stuff whether the little blighters live or die. Yes, it does for the most-part stay true to the PC style, but on a PC or big console version you actually get a sense of facial animation and individuality, here, they just look like a bunch of boring pixels. Surprising that...

The sound is so unremarkable that when we came to write this review we actually had to go back in and check if there actually was any sound. To our surprise, there was sound, but it was boring and irritating, so we turned it off and ignored it.

The problem with Castaway is that it never varies. Whilst in other Sims outings you could better yourself and reach exciting new highs in the career world or become really good at killing people in your swimming pool, here, you just have to stay alive. You wander around the boring lifeless island collecting stuff and developing your survival skills and when you’re done doing that you do it all over again. So unless you find yourself with an unstoppable desire to collect everything and anything at a very slow walking pace, this isn’t the game for you.

What’s most odd about this game is why EA have decided to basically make it The Sims...on an island. They had a chance to change things about a bit and do something a bit ambitious, but what we find in front of us is just another template sequel. There is no ‘terror’ element to your isolation and situation, no mental debilitation, no grit, no guile, just The Sims...on and island. Shame on you EA.