Reviewed: October 8, 2002
Reviewed by: Drew Thrasher
Publisher
Strategy First
Developer
Monte Cristo
Released: August 20, 2002
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
6
7
5
7
6.5
System Requirements
The Partners is an original game, based on psychology and interactions between employees of a major law firm. Enter a fast-moving law office and get involved in the daily up's and down's of your employees. Situations from deep and passionate love affairs to serious hatred and jealousy. Including characters from all walks of life : good-for-nothings, manic-depressive women, sports lovers, playboy's, etc.
Published by Strategy First, this game is definitely a stretch from their normal RTS and strategy game releases. If you have ever played The Sims, then you will feel right at home with this game. It's basically Alley McBeal meets The Sims, and while the Partners is very similar to the Sims in many ways, it is also very different in just as many areas.
Partners features:
- The first complete soap opera video game!
- Over 100 possible interactions between characters.
- Over 250 actions can be performed throughout the working day.
- Over 100 far-fetched cases for your lawyers to sink their teeth into.
- Campaign mode features three campaigns each with seven different missions to complete.
- Freeplay mode lets you control the daily agenda as you wish.
- More than 20 lawyers to manage!
- Discover the nine basic needs that rule human relationships in TV series: love, friendship, sex, success, rest, domination, sport, beauty and culture.
- Strong scenarios inspired by award-winning shows such as Friends, Ally McBeal and Sex and the City.
Sims fans will feel right at home with the Partners interface. It’s almost exactly the same. As a veteran of The Sims, I almost instantly knew where everything is and what everything did. The interface has your buy mode for renovating your law firm (the game also pauses while in this mode) and the Character menu which you can use to keep track of all your characters.
The game is divided into three different campaigns representing the three different law firms. There is also a free play mode, which allows you to go in and customize a scenario. You cannot however, create your own characters.
In the beginning of each campaign, you are given a list of events of what your characters can or cannot do. These events may be as simple as solving a case to cheating on your wife. I found it fun to arrange the firm around so that you can commit those affairs.
On top of keeping up with your characters campaign objectives, you will also have to be responsible for solving cases to bring in money and dodging bullets that the computer will throw at you during the game. All of these tasks are quite challenging and it does create a soap opera like atmosphere, but accomplishing these goals and keeping up with your characters' needs is a daunting task.
The Partners is set in a 3D environment with some nice graphics. The buildings in the game are very solid. The characters are just a detailed as the Sims characters are, and you have more flexibility in the camera angles than you do in the Sims. You can get from almost eye level to a complete birds eye view of the entire law firm.
The only problem is that moving around and getting that perfect angle takes some time. The hardest part I found was using the control key combined with the left and right arrow keys to rotate the camera.
The sound of the Partners can range from very good to exceedingly bad. The title screen was my favorite part. It had a good sound track and I got the feeling that I was going to dive into something quite spectacular. After that, everything starts to go down hill fast.
The voice of your characters is just a bunch of nonsense just like the Sims, but only worse. The way they spoke, didn’t feel quite right. Their mumbling came to a very abrupt end and sounded like they stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. It was as if you are listening to a CD player and suddenly hit stop in the middle of the song. Some of their noises didn’t sound too natural either. I can’t think of the last time I heard some one mumble quite like that in their sleep.
There is a lot you can do within the three campaigns of the Partners. Completing all of your objectives, successfully solving your cases, and keeping your characters happy will take a while. If you get tired of the campaigns you can go into Free Play mode, which will allow you to basically alter every aspect of the game.
In Free Play mode you can customize your scenarios, select the amount of starting income, customize the frequency and difficulties of the law suits that come in, and you can also choose what characters you want to use. There is definitely a lot to do in this game, and it will defiantly keep you busy for quite some time.
The Partners is basically the Sims set in a work environment; specifically a law firm. While it does add some twists and turns during the game to create a soap opera like environment, the Sims is quite a little soap opera of its own without all of the objectives and law suits. I would recommend this game for those who enjoyed the Sims and is looking for a similiar diversion, but others might not enjoy it quite as much.