Reviewed: September 15, 2008
Reviewed by: Mahamari Tsukitaka

Publisher
EA Games

Developer
Electronic Arts

Released: August 26, 2008
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1
6
6
6
6
6.0

Supported Features:

The game starts with the creation of your one Sim, which may be male or female. There isn’t much to customize, though, as you can only choose from a small handful of set appearances, clothing, hairstyles, and colors. It’s a bit unfortunate, considering that a hallmark of the Sims games is the customization of your Sims themselves. But, since this particular spin-off game doesn’t focus on the Sim, it could have probably been overlooked if the other aspects of gameplay had been more engaging. Unfortunately, I didn’t find them much better.

Pet care involves interacting with a number of dogs and cats that are randomly left at the apartment from time to time for your Sim to petsit or treat at the pet spa downstairs. The idea is to diagnose the pet for any ailments—like smelliness, dirtiness, or pest infestation—and to fix these issues, all through playing mini-games. Whether it’s spraying perfume, using a showerhead, or misting on the flea spray, however, the mini-games are all nearly identical: they require you to tap or scribble the stylus on the touch screen (and sometimes press one of the shoulder trigger buttons) in order to direct and apply the treatment on the pet. One spa treatment, thankfully, deviates from this pattern and at least involves an easy card-matching game that plays like a beginner's version of Memory.

The main problem is that these easy and similar mini-games become repetitive and boring very quickly—especially if you choose to treat the maximum of five clients a day, each of which may have up to five issues that need to be treated. The brushing game is actually even a bit annoying, since some of the stylus strokes simply would not register consistently for any of us who tried it. Luckily, however, helping out at the spa yourself is optional, even though personally treating spa pets earns far more Simoleons. Since you get some income whether or not you your Sim goes to work, you could easily skip most of the treatment mini-games.

But even overlooking the tedious mini-games, the other pet interactions, such as stroking the pet or giving it toys, are also very limited and predictable, so playing with your apartment pets isn’t very fun either. It also seems that you don’t need to feed your pets (though you can) or otherwise care for them as you would a real animal, so Apartment Pets is unlikely to be a satisfying simulation for a player looking for a realistic digital pet. The experience, though, would probably be much more entertaining for players who mostly enjoy dressing up their animals with weird accessories (like goggles and cabbie hats), since in that department, there is an absolute boatload of choices to start with and even more to unlock.

Your Sim’s uncle also has a bird, a snake, and a hamster in the apartment that you can interact with, but there’s sadly not much you can do with them besides dress them up in silly getups or play a couple mini-games: a stylus-based Dance Dance Revolution-type game, or a snake charming game requiring the player to play music by pressing buttons and blowing into the DS microphone. I regret to report that neither is particularly interesting.

Sadly, decorating the spa and apartment doesn’t get much better, either. While there’s a decent selection of buyable furniture and other objects, you can only choose the style of the furnishings, not the placement of them. Each object already has a preset location, so even though you can pick your flooring, wallpaper, and furniture style, very little actual customization is possible.

The basic Sims aspect is, like the pets aspects of the game, simply too watered down and not at all a challenge. Your Sim’s mere four needs (Hunger, Bladder, Social, and Energy) decay so slowly that simply greeting one customer, eating once, using the restroom once, and sleeping once per day keeps all meters completely full. This might appeal to a player more interested in playing with the pets than taking care of the Sim, but it would probably put a typical Sims player to sleep.

In short, Apartment Pets had a great basic concept, but it unfortunately failed to deliver much entertainment or depth in any aspect of its hybrid nature. With more mini-game variety and customization options, or at least greater attention in either the pets half or the Sims half, perhaps it could have been a more enjoyable game.

The animals are cute and fairly convincingly modeled and smoothly animated—though there appears to be only one dog and one cat type, so even with a few different colors and markings, there isn’t much variety. The appearances of the Sims leave a bit to be desired, but fortunately, since they’re not the focus of the game, it’s not too distracting.

Besides the pet graphics, one of the game’s better graphical features is probably the PDA menus, which are simply designed and laid out crisply for clear viewing on the small screens. Objects are displayed as 2D sprites in the menu screen to allow for easier identification when browsing the inventory—a good choice. The pet status window is similarly easy to read and understand.