Introduction
Since the original MySims game, EA has a whole new franchise. With MySims Racing the little Sims are moving to yet another direction. No story-based, creativity adventure. No game full of mini-games, like MySims Party, either. This time, the MySims are picking up some vehicles to drive new races. EA found out through some research that one of the game genres Sims fans like most other than the Sims (or MySims) are racing games. That's why the Sims Division has now delivered a first Sims racing game in the form of MySims Racing. Of course we can't wait to tell you what it's all about.
Typically MySims
MySims Racing is not just any racing game for the Wii. It's got a lot of elements you'll recognize from the earlier MySims games. Not just the cartoony style, characters (many familiar friends return), or customizations (more about that later). The story is also somewhat similar. In the story mode, you start off in an almost deserted town. Ol' Gabby, who has a racing school, will explain the story about how Speedville (or whatever name you gave the town) used to be a town full of racers. This was mainly due to Sir Charles who was the best racer of them all. He had plans to make the town the capital of motor racing. Unfortunately, bad guy Morcubus of MorcuCorp wants to make a landfill of the town. Charles and Morcubus made a bet: whoever wins the Ultimate Cup will get the deeds to the town. Just before the big day though, Sir Charles suddenly disappeared after going for his regular Hot Balloon ride. Since then, the town had become deserted as the racers left one by one. Now somebody else will need to prepare, get the town back alive, and eventually win the Ultimate Championship. Guess who that's gonna be?
Once you take up the challenge, you'll get a short drill by Ol' Gabby. He'll teach you the basics of racing - controls, F-Energy, power-ups and essences, they're all explained. Then it's up to you to help the town grow again, so it'll become the racing town it once was. You'll need to help other citizens (friends) of the town out with your car, so their businesses can grow. Complete enough challenges and a championship will be unlocked. Complete this and your town will gain another star rating, unlocking new locations in the process (sounds familiar?). You'll get the first star right after completing the tutorials. After that you'll slowly unlock Greenwood Forest, Danger Canyon and Snowy Mountain to eventually race the Ultimate Cup.
Beloved Friends
Before you'll unlock the championship you'll need to help many old and new friends though - Chef Gino, Violet, Poppy and many more. They'll ask you to collect items (pizzas, flowers, etc) in Item Collect Challenges, reach as many checkpoints as possible before time runs out in the Beat the Clock challenges, race others to win (Race Challenge), race a one-on-one and beat a rival racer (1 vs 1 Race Challenge), drive a track's lap within a given time (Burning Lap Challenge) or drive through an obstacle course as quickly as possible (Obstacle Course Challenge). Each challenge can give you a bronze, silver or gold medal, with the exception of the tutorials. Complete these and you'll immediately get a gold medal, your time or any other metrics do not matter.
You'll mostly come across friends, that have their businesses to build up. As you complete their challenges, you gain friendship with them. Completing a challenge with a gold medal means you'll gain it a bit easier than with a bronze one. Fill up three hearts with your Sim, and you're real good friends. They'll give you an extra blueprint for an upgrade in the garage.
All in all the story mode consists of 78 of these challenges and 4 championships on 15 tracks. There are 14 friends to help, 9 rival racers to beat and 4 crew members with some challenges for you:
Friends:
4 Challenges Each:
- Chef Gino
- Watanabe and Sachiko
- Dolly Dearheart
- Goth Boy
- Madame Zoe
- Master Aran
- Professor Nova
- Roxie Road
3 Challenges Each:
- Poppy
- Samurai Bob
- Shirly
- Travis
- Trevor
- Vic Vector
Rival Racers:
- Brandi
- Chaz McFreely
- DJ Candy
- Fire Chief Ginny
- King Roland
- Morcubus
- Star
- Violet
- Mel the Mummy
Each of these, except Mel the Mummy has 2 challenges for you. Mel has three.
Crew:
- Dr. F
- Mayor Rosalyn
- Ol' Gabby
- Sir Charles
According to the Friends book, you'll have to do a single 1 Vs 1 challenge against Sir Charles. Mayor Rosalyn organizes the various cups you need to win. Ol' Gabby and Dr. F help you get started, though they have a few other challenges up their sleeves too. Everybody except Sir Charles has 4 challenges.
MyRide, be Pimped!
As you complete challenges you'll unlock new parts for your cars. As said before, some friends will also just give you extra blueprints for these upgrades. Other than that, each track has a "hidden" blueprint for you to find (which usually involves jumping to catch it). These are usually somewhere near the actual track or maybe on one of the shortcuts, but can quite easily be spotted as they look like a big blue map floating in the air.
These upgrades can be used in Makoto and Tobor's garage, to "prim' yer ride." You can unlock performance upgrades, which change your car's top speed, acceleration, weight or handling. These come in the form of engines, frames, handling upgrades and some special upgrades. As for the style upgrades, you can change the body of the car, the front and rear bumpers, the spoiler, tail lights, headlights and grills, wheels, add a head ornament, choose side mirrors and even pick the sound of the horn.
MySims Racing wouldn't be a MySims game if you couldn't change your Sim. So, you can edit the hair style and color, skin tone, mouth, eyes, goggles, outfit, name and voice of your Sim. The voice can't be pitched like in earlier MySims games, but otherwise skipping through the choices is fast and easy. For both your car's and Sims' style you just click through the parts to change them. You can pick a gender when you first create your Sim, but it doesn't really seem to matter afterwards. Even when picking a male driver, you can still make him look like one of the female MySims - or the other way around. As you can't change it later on anymore, it seems to be just to pick some default settings. The looks don't affect your car's performance in any way.
Getting the performance upgrades mounted is slightly different than the styles. You cycle through the items you've unlocked in one of the categories. Four bars show your car's stats with the selected item. They're normally yellow. If the item increases a particular metric, the bar is extended with a green bit that shows how much it'll add. Similarly, a part of the bar will be colored red if the item removes a bit from the statistics. Once you've chosen the part to install, you simply do so and the changes are permanent - until you pick another part again.
Before you can use any unlocked style or performance upgrade, you'll need to build it. If you cycle across such an item while upgrading, the game will show you that you need to build it. This costs essences that you collect on the tracks during races. You'll only need to build each item once, after which you can use it on any of the three cars (small, medium or large), as many times as you like. You can also freely replace one part with another, and place it back for free later.
Besides all that you can also change the base color of your car, and apply a pattern. The colors are mostly flat colors, though there are also a few gradients. Unfortunately it's not possible to pick any color or gradient you like - you can only choose from the preset. Similarly, the "patterns" are basically nothing more than a little icon that's placed on your car's doors. There are a few of them, but their color or position can't be changed.
All in all the customization is what you may expect: the under-the-hood items are necessary to keep winning races, but don't change the appeal. The style parts do not affect performance, but allow you to personalize the car and Sim quite a bit. All in all there's quite a bit of customization that you can do, even though it doesn't really affect the gameplay. There are plenty of crazy choices for ornaments and the like, but the choice of color and patterns is somewhat lacking. It doesn't matter much though: it's mostly a nice gimmick that makes the game more MySims, but the core of the gameplay is in the racing, of course.
Beat the Enemy
Similar racing games have on-track powerups which you can fire to make winning just a bit easier. MySims Racing is no different. Think of Melon Accelerators, a Force Field Generator, bubbles and soccer balls, as well as precious Bunny-Luv. There's a power up that makes a tree pop up on the track, a tornado flips the screen upside down for everybody in front of you, and beehives slow down opponents who run into them. The aforementioned Bunny-Luv weapon shoots some love on one of your opponent, greatly reducing their (or your) sight. One of the bigger helps is the UFO, which picks you up and brings you forward on the track quite a lot. If you ever lag behind, it's a great help to get you back in the race.
Another thing that you will need is F-Energy. By collecting essences (small plumbbobs in various colors) during challenges you fill up the boost meter. Other tricks that fill it up are drifting in corners and making large jumps. Finally there are some powerups - either as surprise in a box or as hot wheel pick-up, immediately recognizable on the track - that immediately fill up your boost bar. Touch the boost button and your car will speed up going forward. There are also some boost areas, marked by arrows, on the track that instantly thrust your car in the right direction. If you don't like all of this, blame Dr. F., the inventor of F-Energy and all the power-ups.
More about the Story
You won't need to complete all challenges to get through the story mode, nor do you need to get all gold medals. However, if you do want just gold medals but get fed up with a particular challenge at some point, you can easily move on. If you've upgraded your car a bit later on, and you're ready to go for the challenge again, there's a Friends book that shows all the challenges you've done so far, of all friends, rivals and crew. From there you can pick a race you want to do again, and just get on with it. While in the Friends book, you can also check out the story progress which shows you how many challenges and championships you've completed, how many gold medals you have won, how many friends you've helped and how many of the hidden blueprints you've collected.
The challenges are quite diverse as they're more than just standard races. Some of them indeed are somewhat challenging, though the races against other opponents tend to be on the easy side. As long as you keep your car upgraded you'll quite easily get gold medals on the regular and 1 vs 1 races. Getting gold on some of the other ones is not as easy, though a bronze medal should be reachable for almost anyone at any time.
Less talk, more racing!
Naturally the story mode isn't the only way to get on the racing tracks. If you just want to race, you can head on any track with any Sim and their cars, and do a quick race. You can choose between a time trial, a single race or one of the championships. There's nothing to unlock here, it's just racing for the fun of it. That means you can also pick any track right from the start, and even get started on the Ultimate Championship if you like. It's the longest championship with 5 races, whereas the Town Championship has just 2 races to go through.
Multiplayer-wise, you can only do standard single races. Up to four people can play against each other. The game will add computer controlled racers so the grid of 8 is completely full. Unfortunately there's only a split screen mode though: you can't try to race others over the Internet. You also can't share the cars or sims you created online, though you are able to save them on your Wiimote. When you do so, you can load the cars on another Wii and play them there. So take your Wiimote to your friends, and race with your own car there.
We've tested the multiplayer with two players. During single player games there were no noticeable slow-downs of the game, meaning the game ran smoothly at any time. With two players though, the game occasionally seemed to struggle a bit with a noticeable lower framerate for a short time. While it wasn't all too disruptive, it can get slightly annoying if it happens too often.
But does it look good?
The style of the game is what you may expect from MySims. Cartoony with rectangle-headed MySims, and very colourful. The tracks are varied as you drive through the town, desert, forest or snowy mountain. Gameplay wise though, they're all fairly similar, with no special events on the tracks - just a different layout and look. In story mode the earlier tracks are quite easy, while they become somewhat more difficult as you progress. Some more twists and turns, but also new shortcuts or alternative routes to discover. In fact, some challenges will require you to look for other ways than just the standard route.
The music and sound is not too special. It's not bad, you can sing along with the MySims theme, and just generally enjoy it. It's not anything too outstanding. The voices of your Sims are generally quite soft making it hard to hear those. The story is told by showing cartoon-like pictures with the story text underneath, but no narrating voice.
You can use pretty much any way to control the game as you like: Wiimote, Wiimote with Nunchuck, the Steering Wheel or the Classic or GameCube controller are all functional. Using just the Wiimote may be a little tricky sometimes though: you hold in sideways, and need to tilt it to steer. If you want to make a sharp turn, you'll sometimes find that you turn just a little too far, confusing the game and thus just going straight forward instead of left or right. The retail version of the game comes (optionally) with a free steering wheel, but you can also use Nintendo's own wheel.
The speed in the game unfortunately seems to be somewhat lacking at times. While boosting it gives a good sense of speed, you actually feel that you're going quite fast. There are also parts of the tracks where there's no boost or boost pad available - these parts feel quite slow.
Conclusions
MySims Racing is not groundbreaking, but on itself serves some very solid gameplay. Especially with friends, the split screen mode can be a lot of fun for quite some time. The story itself is not the most compelling, but it serves its purpose and is a nice wrapper around the challenges. The story mode is a very strong element though, with challenges that are refreshing enough to continue playing, though the races challenges are generally too easy. The creativity aspect may not be as deep as the original MySims game, but it's good enough to add a nice personal touch to your game.
Altogether MySims Racing is a very decent kart racer with many fun elements. A definite recommendation for MySims fans, especially those with friends to compete in the multiplayer mode.
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