The Urbz: Sims in the City review

There’s something slickly cynical about The Urbz, a game in which forging ahead means manipulating your so-called friends for pleasurable accoutrements, where slapping backs and wearing smiles just to get into the big name parties is a necessity.

There’s something tragically unsettling in the desperation to dress right in order to ingratiate yourself into a community that wouldn’t accept you otherwise.

An exercise in conformity that spirits any freeform fun away from itself by its sheer repetitiveness. That’s the game in a nutshell. Where the original Sims goals were ones of a sandbox dress up and decorate pleasure, Urbz challenges the player to complete empty goals of making as many friends as possible by adapting to as many lifestyles as possible.

No jacket required

Arriving on the scene with little or no reputation to your name, you design your character, choose one of the nine distinctive districts (artsy, decadent, punk, urban, etc.) and are let loose to become the most popular.

Each district tasks your avatar with the goals of making friends to earn social moves and advance your rep, dressing in the right clothes to get into an exclusive club, to learn a power social (a sort of smart bomb power-up for increasing your standing), to take on three levels of jobs of mildly increasing difficulty, and to perform a task for someone from another district.

Hold on, let me make that a little clearer: each district has exactly the same goals. It doesn’t matter where you try to retreat to there’s nothing different in your actions. Considering you can start your character in any of the districts, none are harder than the other; they’re exactly the same. Consequently, there’s no difficulty involved. Even when you’ve unlocked all the districts the idea of having to juggle your standing between them and maintain your friendships is all but non-existent.

All work, no play

Take the jobs for instance: mini-games you must complete to earn cash and social moves. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sushi chef, a fireworks manufacturer or even a ferret packer, each is the same as the other: push a sequence of buttons as they arrive on your screen to operate your machine while taking care of other menial requirements like emptying your bladder or satisfying your hunger.

Master one district and you have to do it eight more times in the other places. It’s a wasted opportunity to at least provide some variation in mini-games that resounds throughout the rest of the game.

Being a Sims spin-off, you’ve also got your usual compliment of needs to take care of, from eating, sleeping, washing, going to the toilet and having fun. The initial interest therefore lies in discovering which objects in which district affects your levels. This list of context-sensitive options can be quite entertaining at first, finding out what things do what for your needs. A fountain, for instance, can be used to both wash in and splash about for fun.

Cool like The Fonz

The problem is there’s not enough to keep the revelations coming once you’ve played for a while. Being a purely goal-based game, the superfluities of life are meaningless, unless you encourage a needlessly compulsive attachment of your own personality to the character.

Things like washing your hands after going to the toilet or cleaning up after a meal are obstacles that can be ignored in favour of getting everything else done. All that drive to be a party animal, just trying to be loved turns the open-ended structure, therefore, into a restrictive jobbing simulator.

The most important part, the social aspect has its moments. A wealth of animations for greetings and chat give a little character to the bland task behind it. Click on someone, select an option and your avatar performs the action to the whims of the other character, chipping away until they’re friends or enemies, lovers or haters. As calculated as it surely is behind the scenes, though, which social move you can execute seems arbitrary. With the many different characters, most of which need befriending, it’s hard to assign any distinctive personality to them, making them nothing more than tools for your own endeavours. It’s just another reason why this lacks the good vibes that the Sims 2 has been receiving lately.

Urbz and vices

On the technical side it’s something of a horrible mess. The PS2 version reviewed was prone to a horrifically jerky frame rate, the action stuttering whenever it got busy. Combine this with some will-sapping load times, and enthusiasm doesn’t last. It’s especially trying in the case of the couple of apartments you’re given throughout the game.

Beds and all other amenities are provided in each district (free of charge, curiously enough), so the load times and the apartment’s general needlessness mean they’re often ignored. If only to get the pet dog, cat or monkey by filling the place with a required value of furniture would the venture be worthwhile, though somewhat cruel when spending days away to fulfil your needs as it starves in a lonely living room.

The two-player mode also hampers enjoyment. As well as slowing down the action considerably, you can’t fast forward as in single player and any menus opened or places visited disrupt the action for both of you. If anything, it’s some consolation that if one player plays it on their own, all benefits in terms of furniture bought appears in the second player’s game as well.

If The Urbz was marketed as ironic social commentary it may have raised a wry smile, but the frivolous manner in which it tries to appeal to the cool-set eventually becomes irritating. What an ending, though. Rather: What? An ending? The whole game’s depressingly committal in an ‘I’ve come this far, might as well see it through kind of a way’, but fails to reward the effort.

Upon completion of your mission to wheedle into the role of top banana in every alternative lifestyle, you’re given the keys to the penthouse of the coolest guy in town (which is a little bit ironic given his penchant for nylon tracksuits and thick gold jewellery). Then told to go ahead and decorate it to your heart’s content. By that time, though, the need to show any interest in your character has waned and you’re left sitting in your ivory tower with nothing to occupy you except where to place your sofa. A little bit like life, I suppose.