The detectives in MySims Agents perhaps aren’t in the same class as Holmes. For one thing, they never solve murders and don’t get into martial arts smack down fights with any evil professors. Instead, the Agent you play as is asked to unravel rumours, keep track of their employees via text message and get to the bottom of an old mystery involving missing persons, evil artifacts, a yeti and a zombie.

Yeah, Sherlock had it easy.

Loved
Strong Linear Gameplay: MySims Agents shifts the series away from open-ended gameplay where you go pretty much anywhere you want and build stuff for other Sims. Instead, Agents features linear gameplay around a central story plus some side-quests to keep you busy in between story missions. This is a good change for the series because it gives the player a goal to work toward, and it gives MySims the chance to build out characters in a consistent environment. Much better than just randomly building stuff in a hodgepodge world where rocket ships and cowboys somehow exist alongside medieval stuff.

Fixed Camera: A big gripe for fans of the series is the camera. It’s hard to line it up, it’s finicky, it gets stuck — the usual complaints. Most of these issues are addressed in Agents with a fixed camera angle that the user can’t control. It lines itself up for a good perspective when you go into build mode (which is mostly used to decorate your Agent headquarters), and pans back to show you what you need to see in order to solve mysteries or complete jumping puzzles.

Freaking Adorable: I spent almost the whole game playing in the Isaac Clarke suit from Dead Space. It was hilarious and adorable – two things Agents is good at being. From the funny dialogue to the subtle background actions (like your partner randomly falling on his face), the game goes out of its way to amuse and entertain even cynical gamers who’d much rather play Mirror’s Edge than watch their younger sibling and/or girlfriend play through Agents.

Not A Walk In The Part: Yes, it’s a kid’s game and yes it’s cutesy — but it’s a mistake to assume that Agents is totally easy. About half of the game involves puzzles, like jumping puzzles, maze puzzles and mini-game puzzles that occur whenever you need to pick a lock or analyse a sample. As the game progresses, the mini-game puzzles get pretty complex. It shames me to say I got stuck on one of the chemistry puzzles where you have to bond molecules together in specific patterns so that one too many of them aren’t touching. But, hey, being challenged is better than being bored.

Hated
Changing Clothes: A big draw of Agents is finding or unlocking new stuff like decorations for your HQ, paint for the walls, little trophies for the trophy case, or spiffy costumes like the Isaac Clarke suit. The problem is, changing into the clothes you find is a right pain in the arse. Not only does it entail a couple of loading screens, the wardrobe system makes it hard to find just the right combo of stuff by filing different pieces of clothing in various categories. If you pick the wrong category to find the Isaac Clarke suit, you can’t just back to the outfit selection menu — you get dumped out of the whole wardrobe system and have to go through the loading screens all over again ’til you find the right outfit. Trifling, sure, but still a pain.

Intrusive Wiimote Notification: I’m not sure if this is Nintendo’s fault for having high standards or the developer’s fault for not coming up with a better solution. Either way, when your Wiimote is running a little low on battery (say, down to the last bar), a notification pops up in Agents. The problem is it pauses gameplay with no warning. Also, it can totally mess up your jump if this happens in the middle of the jumping puzzle. Even worse, there’s no way to turn off the notifications or make them less intrusive. So while you could in fact play the entire 7-8 main game with only one bar of battery like I did, you’re not going to want to. Because the effing game keeps interrupting you.

Maybe A Bit Too Repetitive For Some: Most adventure games can be broken down into go-here-talk-to-this-guy-solve-puzzle-repeat patterns. I have no problem with this in Agents because it’s a kid’s game and kids need repetition to learn stuff (like how to solve those effin’ chemistry puzzles). However, jaded gamers might get super-frustrated when they find that all the cases in the game follow the same pattern. Sometimes the writing is funnier in one case than another and the setting is always dramatically different – but that might not be enough to break up the monotony.

People have a sad habit of saying “game X is a good game…for the Wii.” As if a game on the Wii can’t just be good all by itself. MySims Agents fixes this problem for me, because I feel like I can say it’s a good game. Period.

It could be on any other system and I would say the same thing: it’s fun, appropriately long with decent controls and appealing visuals. If there’s more to being a good game than that, I’d have to hire a professional detective to determine what that could possibly be. And since I don’t have the money to waste, let’s just say Agents is a good game. Case closed.

MySims Agents was developed by The Sims Studio and published by EA for the Wii and DS. Released on September 29 for $US50 and $US30 respectively. Played through the main story mode and finished about half of the dispatch missions to work toward the secret ending. Spent almost all of that time in the Isaac Clarke suit because it’s awesome.

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The mansion is set up like the board game Clue, except nobody dies. Instead, somebody breaks something and your Sim has to find out who did it by going over every inch of the mansion for clues and questioning other Sims. I know you’re thinking “Whatever, standard adventure game stuff for kids.” But, dear cynical gamer, there’s something here aimed directly at you, not at a kid.

On the second floor of the mansion, there are some portraits you can interact with. Peer at a smaller one toward the right of the collection and who should be staring back at you but Faith from Mirror’s Edge. Later, with some dedicated snooping and side mission completion, you can score an Isaac Clarke outfit from Dead Space for your secret agent Sim to wear.

Little details like this make up a lot of the MySims Agents experience. This makes sense, because the game is about becoming a star detective—and you won’t get far on that path without an eye for details like strange portraits, footprints or hair salons. Throughout the game, you level up your snooping skills by upgrading gadgets and improving personal stats like charisma. You also build out your detective agency’s headquarters and recruit other Sims to work for you.

That’s another important detail I missed in my first look: the dispatch missions. Sure, I saw one of them and wrote about it—but I didn’t grasp quite how important they were to the game as a whole. There are a total of 50 dispatch missions that you can send your recruited Sims out to solve. While a dispatch mission is in progress, your Agent Sim will receive texts on how the mission is going and sometimes a random chance card in the form of a phone call. Completing dispatch missions raises your Agent’s relationship with client. Raise a relationship high enough and you can recruit that Sim to work for you (or just dance around like a moron) in your HQ. Once you finish all the dispatch missions, you’ll get to see not one, but two alternate endings after finishing the main part of the game.

I’ve said before that I get the feeling Agents is taking the MySims series in a different direction than previous games. Before (in, say, MySims Kingdom), the series was mostly about building things and visiting familiar characters from within the series. It was isolating to the point where I was embarrassed to play MySims Racing without a child companion to use as an excuse. But now—what with Dead Space references and an actual plot—I feel like the series is moving toward a type of game that could appeal to everybody despite being designed with a younger audience in mind. Kind of like Pixar films in the Disney lineup.

MySims Agents will be released later this month.

The MySims series started out as a cutesy, cartoony version of the Sims series for PC and Wii that would let a younger generation of gamer take a crack at the building and customisation of the Sims without asking them to navigate sexual relationships and simulated job grinds. From there, the series experimented with a more structured kind of game – like MySims Racing or MySims Kingdom – that had elements of other game genres around to direct gameplay objectives. However, it was still mostly a free-roaming game without much direction.

Now we have MySims Agents, an evolution in the MySims series toward a serious adventure game. Sure, it’s still cutesy and cartoony – and about 85% of the cast is made up of Sims we’ve seen in other MySims game – but this is a game on a mission. And the mission is to become a secret agent.

What Is It?
MySims Agents is an adventure game for the Wii following the rise of a gumshoe detective to world-class agent as he works to recover the stolen Nightmare Crown. Players take the role of this young detective and progress through a series of mostly-linear levels to find clues, interview people and ultimately get to the bottom of the bigger mystery. Most of the gameplay is centered around gadgets that the player levels up over time – like evolving a basic magnifying glass to a high-tech footprint sensor – as well as the leveling of companion detectives that the main character can recruit.

What We Saw
I sat down for about an hour’s worth of fiddling at EA Redwood Shores. The save I was playing on was toward the end of the game, so a lot of stuff was unlocked and gadgets were already leveled up.

How Far Along Is It?
MySims Agents is due out in September just before the mega-October rush. The build looked solid to me, although my hands-on time was limited to certain areas and puzzles because they were 100% finished.

What Needs Improvement?
Mind The Puzzle-Platform Ratio: A lot of Agents involves solving agent-y puzzles like lock-picking or hacking a computer. However, there are some platforming sections where the player has to guide the Agent through a jumping puzzle or across balance beams. Depending on how the ratio of puzzles-to-platforming stacks up, these sections will either blend in seamlessly with the secret agent theme or leave the player grumbling in frustration about how James Bond never got mobbed by butterflies and fell off a cliff.

What Should Stay The Same?
Adventure Gameplay: Part of the problem with the adventure-flavored MySims Kingdom was that there just wasn’t enough structure to the story. It was hard to care about what the King wanted when there were endless possibilities for rearranging your house décor and endless numbers of Sims that wanted you to build junk for them. MySims Agent zeros in on the story and while it still that “Hey, let’s go rearrange furniture in your secret headquarters” gameplay, there seems to be enough structure to the game to propel you out into the world to start solving mysteries instead of aimless wandering around to provoke local wildlife.

Fixed Camera: MySims Agent has a fixed camera that the player cannot control. This works well with the gameplay, because it allows the level developer to hide things from the player that they have to do detective work to find. It also makes Build mode less tedious because the Agent has to stand on a specific spot to enter build mode so that the camera can fix itself in the best possible angle for seeing the building area – a definite improvement over MySims Kingdom.

Smooth Sim Integration: A big part of any Sim game is working on inter-Sim relationships. This element makes its way into Agents through the recruitment system and the special side missions system. As the player goes through the game and meets all different kinds of Sims, he or she can recruit Sims as secret agent operatives. Recruiting a Sim moves them into the Agent’s headquarters and the Agent can send them out to do side missions for other Sims, which improves the Agent’s relationship with those Sims. While on these special missions, your Agent can carry on with main story missions and receive updates (or pleas for advice) from your other Agents in the field via text message. So it’s almost like you’re playing two games at once and that way, you can reap twice the benefits. Depending on who you recruit and how you train them, you can have a crack team of investigative Sims – or a bunch of bums that clutter up your basement.

Masks: There’re a lot of hidden things in every level like bonus outfits or special items – but the big ticket items are always masks. Each mask a Sim finds has special abilities attached to it, like charisma or athleticism, and hanging the masks on a particular floor of the Agent’s HQ trains all Sims that live on that floor in those skills. This is a neat way to customise your crack team of investigators because different missions require different combinations of skills. You can of course pick and choose different Sims from different floors to go on special side missions or take with you on main story missions – but sending an entire floor of Agents to do your bidding is both convenient and cool.

Final Thoughts
I’m looking forward to MySims Agents because I want to see MySims series evolve into solid adventure games. Between the collectibles and the unlockable hard puzzles, there’s enough content here to move MySims away from the stigma of “baby’s first god-complex game” and toward a series that appeals to everybody. During my demo, one of the MySims development team guys compared the series to The Muppets, saying that it’d be ideal to have a franchise of characters that you could use to tell any kind of story – or in this case, populate any kind of game. I’d be down with that; and I really hope Agents can lead the charge.

The MySims are everywhere now. They’re partying, racing, defending fantasy kingdoms, and now taking on the role of secret agents embroiled in a web of mystery and intrigue. In the Wii version, players recruit a dream team of MySims investigators in order to foil the sinister plot of Morcubus, lord of the criminal underworld. In the DS version, players are helping the Mayor prevent the theft of an ancient artifact by a notorious thief. Both games feature tons of problem solving, clue analysing, and computer hacking, all in convenient mini-game format.

“We’re thrilled to bring you MySims Agents, the next game from MySims, something completely different than any MySims game before,” said Tim LeTourneau, General Manager of the MySims franchise. “Its mystery-meets-adventure theme allows players to hone their problem-solving skills while still enjoying all of the beloved MySims charm; characters, customisation and humour.”

So basically, EA is trying to turn the MySims brand into their own personal Lego property, only without the Lego. Cute little customisable block people for the win. I eagerly await the announcement of MySims Batman.

MySims Agents is scheduled for release this spring. Click through to check out some screenies.