ESRB: E
Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
Number of Players: 1
Publisher: EA Play
Release Date: September,2009
Available on Wii and DS.

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MySims Agents is the newest title in the MySims franchise. MySims Kingdoms was the first title to include a story and it was easy to fall in love with MySims Kingdoms characters. Since MySims Kingdoms sold well, it’s great to see the team back with a new title. MySims Agents uses characters that we met in My Sims Kingdoms and adds a few new ones.

Players start by creating their own customized secret agent. Customizing your agent is very easy and throughout the game you gain more items to change into. More items than you really need actually, but there is nothing wrong with an abundance of choice. Customizing doesn’t stop at hair or clothing, gamers are also able to customize the pitch of their agent’s voice and decorate their agent with face decals.

You play as someone who wants to be an undercover agent but must go through and solve local town problems before getting promoted. That leads you to the big stuff and overarching story of an evil guy who wants to take over the world. In between, you’ll find city corruption, puzzles to solve, and lands to travel to.

One thing that is a positive in the game is the variety of areas that you will go to to solve mysteries and move along the story. It’s all very linear but you can revisit the towns any time. When you graduate to an undercover agent you get an office at headquarters. This is where things get interesting. The headquarters is made up of different floors that you will assign your team to. Yes, you get to choose your team. As you solve mysteries, MySims characters will volunteer to be a part of your team. Players will need to pay careful attention as to how they assemble the teams on different floors. This is because you want certain floors/teams to be strong in different areas. There are five areas that they can be strong in: charisma, sports, nature,paranormal, and smarts. This is important to pay attention to because when you visit the floor of the team, you can set down items you earn along the way to increase the attributes that they are strong in. This is some of the building in the MySims world. You’ll move and place items in the same manner as you did in MySims Kingdom with the help of a new gun, the F-Space Manipulator . There is a maximum amount of stuff you can have on the floor at any point in time. Even though the floor may be full, you are still collecting items which may be stronger than items that you currently have on the floor. The problem I had was I couldn’t tell which items were lower in the attributes without removing them and putting them back in my inventory. I would definitely recommend creating a better system where you can check the attributes of an item before pulling it into your inventory.

You have your team, but what do you do with them? This is where the phone comes in. At the front desk you get an assistant that helps keep track of open cases that you can send your teams to. They work the cases, hopefully finish them, and then you can send them out again to a different case. As they are working on a case, you’ll get several phone calls from the team members and the case requester. This can be overwhelming and annoying when you are working on a case. But the good news is, you don’t have to answer them right away. The bad part is to send your team on a new case after they solve one, you have to be back at headquarters. I found that I didn’t send out my teams enough and by the end of the game I was left with a ton of team cases to solve. Back to that point later.

The tools are more sophisticated in MySims Agents because you’re an agent so why shouldn’t you have cool tools? You’ll have a lock pick tool which takes you to a mini-game where you have to move tubes around to get the key to the lock. I always found these fun to solve! The other mini-game is connecting gears and spare parts to fix items. I found some of these to be REALLY HARD. I mean if this game is for kids, I’m not sure how they could solve some of them. Now there are sites that show a picture of the finished product, so you don’t have to be stuck for too long, but the difficulty in the puzzles increased really fast and I feel it’s definitely too tough for kids. The other mini-game you run into is the analyzing game. In this game you match up molecules based on their count. It definitely will take a few shots, but these puzzles are do-able.

Overall, the story is very entertaining. I love the MySims world and I’m so happy that Agents included many improvements from Kingdom. I love some of the new mechanics and the fixed camera. I think the use of the F-Space Manipulator to move things works really well. MySims Agents has a great comic book look and never lets go of the undercover detective theme throughout the game. My two complaints are that some of the mini-games are really too difficult, and that it is not easy to continually send out your teams to finish all the side cases. I finished the game but then was told to finish the side quests, none of which I can assign to myself! So I end up just waiting around as they turn in quests. Talk about boring!

This is definitely a title that can be played by adults or adults with kids. Very enjoyable and I hope that EA Play continues to explore the MySims world. I really enjoy the story-driven approach of Agents. My last plea to EA Play is to make figures of these cute guys already! I want them all on my desk!