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The game places you into a forest where you get to be the controlling hand of a watchful deity. You make friends with the denizens of the forest by using your hand to bring them food, petting them like the furry animals they are, or introducing them to a romantic possibility. Through these forest-society building efforts, your forest creatures come to know and love you, or not. Since the game is based on you expanding as you satisfy your creatures, you have to make sure you don’t become an angry wrathful God and rain down devastation amongst them, or you’ll find it difficult to make it to the next level. This game is very free-form though, so you have plenty of opportunities to try your own simulation activities for forest-empire building.

While the game itself brings a lot of good ideas to the table, the actual implementation is difficult to control with the Wii remote, with you needing to be extremely precise with your aiming to be able to perform the action that you’re trying to do. Sometimes, even when you have your pointer on the spot it should be, it won’t recognize the action you are trying to perform, making the game extremely frustrating.

There is a multiplayer aspect to SimAnimals in that up to four players can play simultaneously. But, since there is only one pointer and map on the screen at once that all the players can control, this is generally only more frustrating as everyone tries to do their own thing, and no one gets anything accomplished.

Even if you do manage to get some stuff accomplished while playing through the game, it won’t take long to realize that there wasn’t a lot of consideration put into quality when making the game. You’ll see animals trapped in trees and rocks, floating above the ground, and generally not looking anything at all like the animals that they’re supposed to be simulating.

This Sims title is most disappointing in that it doesn’t live up to the level of quality that other Sims games provide. While the general idea has potential, this title doesn’t show it. It’s not a game that’s hopelessly broken, but it is a game that is lacking in both fun, and a working control scheme, which makes it difficult to spend time on. Hopefully, the developers learned something with this game, and the version that we can expect to be released in the future will keep the gameplay but make the control scheme, and graphics, a much higher priority.