MySims Racing Review - Wii

5.5

Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 4
Audio: 7
Multiplayer: 6
Innovation: 5

Ever wondered what it would be like to hit the road with your MySims? Artificial Mind and Movement, best known for the High School Musical games on DS have developed a brand new racing game in an attempt to give people who use the Nintendo Wii console an alternative to Mario Kart. With the best selling game so far this year being The Sims 3, MySims Racing gives you an alternative genre to customise your Sims creations. Read on to find out if it’s worthy of your Wii library.

Gameplay

Starting up MySims Racing, there are multiple modes of play to choose from. There’s Quick Race, Multiplayer, and Story Mode where you’ll find most of the game’s contents. In Story Mode, you can create and customise a character and their vehicle with a handful of basic choices. For fun, we put a bunny head on our character and gave her a monocle, much like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. You can customise your vehicles too, but it’s nowhere near as in-depth as we’d like it to be. You have less options on creating your unique character than you do when you create a Mii on the Wii dashboard, but this does allow you to finish the customisation part quickly so that you can get on to what the game is all about - racing.

When you begin the Story Mode, you’re in a town known as Speedville that has been abandoned and only has a few remaining citizens. With this knowledge, you must do errands and races in order to prove your worthiness and come first in the championships. Completing the championships will help restore Speedville to the once flourishing town that it allegedly was. Moving around the town is similar to the Super Mario Bros. platformers where you move from place to place, and getting around the town is nice and easy. Whenever there are new challenges, there is a bouncing head at the location you need to get to, which makes the game very simple and easy to use for kids. The bouncing heads are heads of your ‘friends’, which as you complete more tasks for, their friend meter will rise. Once it’s maxed out, they’ll give you a present, which is usually a very worthwhile upgrade.

Unfortunately though, the game has a very steep learning curve. We found that it takes quite a lot of effort to get used to the controls, and the races with five other racers can be a nightmare given most of the power-ups are dropped behind the karts, thus targeted at the racers who are not coming first. What separates MySims Racing from Mario Kart Wii is the ability to jump. You can lift your kart about 4 feet in the air with a flick of the Wii Remote, allowing you to obtain hard to reach items, and the jumping also helps to gain the lead if your opponents are dropping items all over the ground.

Once you’ve completed a few events, you soon learn that ...