Product Description

SimAnimals, take the wild world of animals into your hands. Embrace all the adventure, fun, and mischief that await you in the vast forest. Feed a bear what he craves. Pick up a rabbit or hedgehog, and bring him to his friends. Discover what other creatures lurk in the wild. You have the power to reach out and touch, pick up and move everything in the forest from squirrels and foxes to trees and flowers. Make your wild animals happy and maintain a forest that lets them flourish as you venture further into the forest than you've ever been before. Engage wild animals, experience life in the forest, and let your creativity run wild in SimAnimals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1058 in Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Model: 014633190694
• Published on: 2009-01
• Released on: 2009-01-21
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo Wii
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .56" h x 7.49" w x 5.51" l, .36 pounds

Features

• Interact with over 30 species of animals in the forest
• Unlock forest areas such as swamps, woodlands, and castle ruins
• Interconnected world changes in real-time based on your actions
• Different tasks to complete and challenges to solve
• Up to four players can play together at the same time

Amazon.com Product Description
SimAnimals, the latest Sim video game from Electronic Arts, lets you explore a vast forest of wild animals and make it your own. With over 30 species of animals spread out in the woodlands, swamps, and more, this game will reveal secrets about the wilderness and teach you what it takes to survive in the wildlife.

Use the Wii remote to interact with dozens of animals. View larger.

Plants and animals will habitat differently depending on your actions. View larger.

Beavers can create a dam to trap water. View larger.

Engage with Your Favorite Animals
Whether you like bears, foxes, badgers, squirrels, or owls, SimAnimals lets you touch, move, and play with them and other animals from the Northern Hemisphere. Using the Wii remote, you can pick an animal up and bring him to his friends, feed a bear, and touch just about everything in the forest, including trees and flowers.

Depending on how you treat the animals, they will either trust you or fear you, which in turn will affect how they evolve. How the forest ends up is up to you, but remember that you can only unlock new forest areas and explore into areas such as the swamps or castle ruins when the animals are happy. There are a total of 11 areas that need to be unlocked one at a time.

Interactive, Dynamic Environment
All of the areas in the forest are connected, and what you do in one area will cause changes to happen in another. For example, if the beavers build a dam, it will create a lake on one side of it while removing the water on the other side. This in turn can create a large amount of ducks in the lake, but plants that needed water down the river might die out. You'll have a lot of fun watching all these changes in the world occur in real time.

Solve Different Challenges and Discover Forest Secrets
SimAnimals provides players with different challenges to solve in order to live happily in the forest. You'll have to figure out which plants grow better when near water, which foods different animals need to live near, and more. As you get further into the forest, you'll meet animals with special abilities and one-of-a-kind objects.

Play Together in the Forest with your Friends
You can have up to three other friends to play with you in the forest, interacting with the animals all at once. Your idea of a good forest might conflict with someone else's, and you'll see interesting results every time you play.

Customer Reviews

My kids love it!
I have a 12 and 10 year old. They have been waiting for this game to come out for months! They have now been playing it non stop and absolutely love it. The graphics are truly beautiful and the animal movements are great! They have also played Viva Pinata, and that is what this game reminds me of! You need to do certain things in order to attract animals to you. (Example: Acorns will bring squirrels). Once the animal comes, you earn it's trust by interaction (petting, feeding ect...) Once you earn a certain species trust, it will unlock chances for a different species to visit you, depending if you have what it takes to attract it or not! The concept is brilliant! Not only are you able to interact with animals, it is teaching kids to be responsible by taking care of their animals. I highly recommend this game to ANYONE that is an animal lover! I'm the mom and even I love it! *grins*


UPDATE:
After playing the game for a bit I personally feel that if there was a game that was a mix between Viva Pinata and Nintendogs....this is it!

Players are able to farm and plant different types of trees and plants for your animals. Certain animals will try and eat the saplings and you must protect them if you want them to mature.

As in life, some species of animals eat other types as a food source. Let's say you have a bear cub that eats rabbits, but you don't want him to. You can train him/her as a baby to not eat rabbits, so when he grows up he will be a herbivore (plant eater). It does take a good amount of work on your part to achieve this, but it can be done!

Animals come in a few different colors, but nothing unusual. Bears are brown, rabbits are white and brown ect... If you are the type that love to have pink and purple animals have no fear! There are game missions you can complete that will give rewards that will allow you to change animals to special colors. Different missions have different rewards so there is no telling what all you can get!

I honestly feel that this game will give hours and hours of enjoyment while teaching some good life lessons. It teaches that something worth having may take a little hard work, but the rewards are well worth it! It also teaches you to be responsible, if you are lazy or careless your plants and animals will retire.

All in all I give this game 5 stars, way to go EA games!

I love all Sim/Tycoon games, but this one was disappointing.
Let me start by saying I'm a huge fan of the Sims games. I have been a fan of them since they started making Sim City and Sim Theme Park for DOS. And like many of you, I really like The Sims, Sims 2 and pretty much anything Sim related on any platform. But I was disappointed in SimAnimals (for the Wii). I guess I was just expecting a bit more from the game.

When you start the game, your in what feels like a tutorial mode where it explains what to do step by step. Giving squirrels acorns and petting them to make them your friends. Then after making so many animals happy by befriending them and putting food in front of them, it opens up another area of the map for you to explore.

This is the part where you think to yourself, "Ok, now to really play the game and see what's out there to explore". Quickly I realised that the second spot on the map is just another area of the woods, where you make some more animals your friends by feeding them and petting them, thus making them happy so you can open another area of the map. Through out the whole game you never quite feel like you leave the tutorial mode.

When going to a new part of the map, you are basically just opening up new (usually larger) animals to befriend and new plants to feed them. I was left wishing for more to do in the game.

If I had known the game was this (for lack of a better word) dull and had so little to do in it, I would not have paid $50 for it. I really wish I had a nicer way to put this, because I LOVE Sim/Tycoon games, even the simplest ones, but this one was just not worth the money. I wish I had waited until some reviews were out and realised it was not worth the $[...]. My kids will play it some (8 year old twins, one boy, one girl), but seem to tire of it quickly and move on to something else.

If you want to get this, I recommend waiting a little while and perhaps the price will drop to make it a better price for what you get.

Beautiful graphics and an interesting game
Even though the Wii isn't noted for it's graphics this game takes full advantage of what is possible and the graphics are some of the best I've seen on any Wii game. The animals and their settings with all the plants and trees reminds you of a Disney movie. The movement is a little jerky at times, but not really bad. Being able to interact with the animals is really cool. I played this with a friend's kids, but I have to admit there was an attraction to the game even as an adult.

The animals are wary of you to begin with and you have to earn their trust. Then again, if I saw a big white hand coming out of nowhere I'd be frightened too! You earn their trust by offering them food and interacting with them. You can interact with the plants and trees too, by picking them up and moving them or planting them. You have to take care of them so that they grow and keep the animals from eating them when they're small. You quickly learn to plant the types of things that each animal likes in order to attract them. If you don't make friends with the animals they're afraid of you. One thing that was a little disturbing to me (but the kids thought it was cool) was that the animals can eat each other, just like they do in the wild. So you have to plan their environment and puts plants and other animals around that they are compatible with. The kids wanted to smack the animals too (!) but this makes them afraid of you and you can end up with a terrible environment as well as a good one.

There is enough game play here to keep kids busy for a long time and provide entertainment for adults as well. It is much like the other Sims games where you have control over the environment and can make it turn out any way you want to. If you like the other Sims games I think you'd probably like this one.

All in all, it's a charming family type game and would be a good addition to the Wii library.