Reviewed: October 30, 2007
Reviewed by: Mahamari Tsukitaka

Publisher
Electronic Arts

Developer
Maxis

Released: October 22, 2007
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1

8
7
8
7
7.8

Supported Features:

The game starts players off with Sim creation, allowing you to create one to six Sims as your crew. In other words, you can choose to play the game a la Tom Hanks’ Castaway, or like the Swiss Family Robinson; it’s all up to you. You can customize the Sims’ appearances, personalities, and occupations, the last of which will define which skills your Sims start out with.

Each skill will be helpful in a different way as soon as your Sims are shipwrecked. For instance, Mechanical skills are good for harvesting resources and building structures, whereas Creativity may be necessary in putting together new clothes for your Sims, and Body skills are needed for exploring new areas. Don’t worry if your Sims don’t start out with the skills they need, though; they can be learned through ordinary survival activities, such as hunting, gathering materials, or building simple structures.

In any case, you pick one Sim to start the game with, and that Sim begins the game alone and washed up on a beach. It is then up to you, the player, to help your first Sim gather resources – like bamboo, vines, banana leaves, and other building materials, as well as food – and cobble together some sort of rough life on the island. Later, you may find the rest of your crew (if you created more than one Sim), and this may make eking out a primitive existence a little easier, though it also means taking care of additional Sims.

As in other Sims games, part of Castaway’s challenge is that you’ll have to personally keep an eye out for your Sim’s needs, making sure that your Sim doesn’t, for instance, starve or go insane from loneliness. Luckily, the game starts you off with a sleeping mat and an infinite roll of toilet paper, so your Sim’s basic needs won’t be completely neglected while he or she figures out how to build the structures (such as a fire pit, a bed, or a shelter) needed to better serve these needs. Plus, these needs are introduced slowly, so that the player has time to get used to fulfilling each need before a new one is added to the list.

To help players along, the game provides survival books that your Sim will find on the island, which provide objectives that help make Castaway a game a bit more suitable for the console crowd. These goals will help guide you through some of the bare bones of the game, but they unfortunately often consist of very basic goals, plus some more distant goals that cannot be accomplished without the player figuring out the undisclosed intermediate steps required in between. Depending on the type of gamer you are, you may find this to be either a pleasant challenge or a source of frustration, especially since it’s certainly possible to get stuck in the game for a period of time without the extra guidance of provided goals.

Despite this flaw, Castaway generally plays pretty smoothly. Ordinarily, new plans for building more advanced tools or structures can be acquired by simply having your Sims construct all the tools for which they have plans available, and this will open up new plans, some of which are needed to move forward in the game.

Building and arranging living quarters can be fun, but it can also be a bit of a bear at times. Laying down structures and items is freeform, as it is in the PC Sims 2 games, but depending on the area you choose to build upon, you may be limited by geography, as well as by the plants growing in the region. Unfortunately, you cannot clear plants or rocks to make room for more structures, so what you see is what you get.

In addition to fulfilling your Sims’ needs and building them shelter, there are multiple areas to explore, new plants to identify and gather, and useful artifacts (such as hieroglyphics and treasure map pieces) to collect. Castaway also introduces a level of dynamism to your Sims, as their clothes do gradually get torn up, their skin may become sunburned, and their hair and beards become overgrown with time. It’s definitely a nice touch for a Sims game, especially since these changes in appearance are only cosmetic, and you can always give your Sim a haircut and sew up his or her clothes to go back to a more groomed look.

Castaway isn’t without its flaws, however. For one, moving furniture and structures, for some reason, is accomplished through the Inventory menu, whereas building new furniture and structures happens through the Plans menu. It’s a bit counterintuitive, though it’s manageable once you get used to it. Load times between areas are also on the long side, though at least the developers made sure to include an Island Map that allows you to skip directly to locations you’ve already explored. There are also a few other minor flaws – such as targeting difficulties in some locations, and mislabeled current actions when you switch between Sims – but all in all, Castaway’s gameplay is solid and a lot of fun.

The lush and colorful tropical environments are well designed and pleasant to look at, the shifts between night and day (as well as the weather effects) are smoothly transitioned, the animations all flow naturally, and the characters themselves still have that distinctively whimsical Sims look.