The URBZ - Review

Being a metrosexual is in. Live off your parents income in a riverside apartment, work out several hours a day and finish of with a soothing yoghurt/licorice/oatmeal facial. This booming market of potential gamers has of course gotten lots of attention from EA, which used its popular The Sims series to portrait this life in The Urbz - available on almost all platforms. The GBA edition hans been converted to Nintendo DS with a couple of new features.

The Sims - metrosexual style

For this very reason The Urbz looks like a typical Game Boy Advance game instead of a title developed specially for Nintendos newest platform and including impressive uses of touchscreen and graphics. The storyline and the gameplay for instance is exactly the same as the existing version. You initially create a character of either sex, which can then be equipped with certain clothes and appearance. After you have answered a set of basic questions the game creates your personality and interpersonal relations in the social sphere. You can either be a nerd, an artist, a spoiled rich brat or a street punk. None have vital influences in the following events.

Afterwards you are introduced to the plot. A wealthy capitalist tries to overtake every house in peaceful Miniopolis and convert the city to a tourist attraction. Your moral code prohibits you from accepting this and you wind up in jail for plotting against the boss. After your release it is time to find your own little place and begin your march toward the top spot in the social hierarki in order to continue your opposition. The game is similar to all other editions of The Sims, giving you control of every aspect of your Simmers life. He has basic needs that must be provided, be they social, consumptional or even latrinal. Several of the known tools from real life can be procured for this, or used in other locations than the home. Much of the action is placed outside of the house, since The Urbz is about socializing rather than being career focussed. You are in a minor city with several types of inhabitants, all necessary in your struggle against the evil capitalist. The task is not an easy one and you need to be cool.

Gossip your way to the top

For the purpose of social advancement, the game has been kitted out with a new speech system, allowing you to choose between three subjects or acts at a time when meeting a person. It is of course advisable to talk about subjects of interest to the person in question and not for instance chat with Malibu Barbie about tombstones. Luckily all types of character are quite superficial and laden with prejudice making the subject selection a bit easier. Generally speaking it is easy to make friends in The Urbz, to the point of making the conversational part of the game a bit tedious.

But do not let that fool you into thinking the same of the rest of the game. The challenges are numerous and should you want to complete them all you are looking at more than 30 hours of concentrated gameplay. It is very easy as well to just play on and off for a few Simmerdays, just to accustom one self with the rythm of the game and give some skills to one's Simmer. Once the missions start ticking in the number of challenges are only wont to increase, these being very varied and with very different demands. Often it can be quite difficult simply guessing what you are supposed to do to solve a given task, but when you are juggling several balls at once, the solutions have a way of presenting themselves by chance. Some times, however, a mission may be rather illogical in it's construction, especially when you have to find a certain NPC, since their location changes whenever you enter or leave a room after an extended period of time. The gameplay often feels stretched, but since you are not bound to a single linear storyline, this does not feel too annoying.

Pretty fast conversion

Most of The Urbz is still a bit of a dodgy affair and one could have wished for a greater focus on socializing, the main feature advertised. The hip-big-city-life-feel is never really present since your circle of friends remain rather tight and most of the areas look like ghost towns. The biggest letdown, however, is the sloppiness with wich the game has been converted to the DS. The innovative new functions are barely visible since the only improvements have been to the menu system and access to character, job and mission information. These are found in the lower display, giving the game a more intuitive interface, but not an overly impressive one in the same way as the features of for instance Super Mario 64 DS.

The graphics seem no more optimized for the DS platform, on the contrary it looks like the normale paste of low-detail 2D sprites on a static background. The spirites are not particularly impressive, actually they are not even modelled in 3D, and the backdrops look like anything found on your Game Boy Advance. When looking at other achievements on the DS, The Urbz fail to make a mark. In fact it simply seem as a speedy conversion in order to launch the game simultaneously with the machine. The sound effects are quite a bit funnier even if the music -good in both quality and buildup- becomes uniform rather quickly. Luckily the Simmer voices are back, and still pretty far out every single time one converses. Well done. The general technical impression is not the best we have seen, as the speed of development shines through. Not much DS nor innovation to be found here.

Entertainment for the past generation.

All together this makes The Urbz a game to be bought only if one is a fan of the series or of games that last. It provides the classical Simmer gameplay, with minor changes to accommodate the hand held format, but do not hold your breath while searching for any major innovations with regards to the DS side of things. Nor should you look long at the technical aspects as the game falls some way behind other launch releases.

Source: Boomtown DK
Translated by: William Bjarnø (Dworkin)