My first encounter with the Sims franchise was when EA ported the original Sims to the consoles back in 2002-or-so. I actually wasn’t expecting to like the game, but it turned out to be an unexpected surprise, as I spent countless hours creating layouts of houses and building relationships with my fellow Sims. Ironically, even though I enjoyed my time with the Sims; I’ve stayed away from the franchise mostly out of happenstance: I didn’t have a powerful enough computer until a few months after Sims 2 came out, and the later console versions seemed like they were quick cash-ins to Sims 2 By the time the 3rd game came out, I was far enough removed from the franchise to simply skip it and move on.

So when given the chance to try out Sims Medieval, I jumped on it primarily because I’d figured that the unique setting would provide a fresh opportunity to get back into the series that I enjoyed eight-years-ago. Problem is — a few unexpected things got in the way of my enjoyment.

Before I get into those, I should point out that the Sims Medieval has a bunch of gameplay changes that may throw even veteran Sims fans for a loop: mainly that the game is a lot more quest oriented to give the game a semi-RPG feel. Once you create your monarch, name your kingdom and complete your tutorial, you’re given a choice of missions to choose from, with the point being to increase your funds while gaining the respect and loyalty of your people. Depending on your choices, your King/Queen can be a kind or semi-cruel ruler, though not too cruel or your people may revolt and you’ll find yourself on a quick trip to the monsters pit.

The missions aren’t generally complicated; the beginning ones consist of tasks such as finding a lost child, finding your roots; writing treaties, etc… Obviously you’ll need to other things in between such as eat, sleep and do odd side quests to increase your focus meter (keeping your focus high greatly increases your chance of succeeding in completing tasks). Eventually you’ll gain enough money and experience to build up your kingdom which will lead you to creating different types of characters like Knights and Wizards.

While the game has a lot of content to keep you playing for a long while if you choose to do so; whether you’ll want to is an open question as most of the quests just aren’t that exciting. One of aspects of the original Sims that appealed to me was the fact that you could almost do anything at your own pace. In Sims Medieval, you’re forced to do generally unexciting missions in order to progress through the game. While missions can often have funny results, actually playing them consists of clicking mostly predetermined options. Think of it as playing a point-and-click adventure with the right answer highlighted most of the time. Sure, you can just mingle around like in the old games but doing so especially during the first few hours will get you nowhere. Now I know that things have to change as sequels progress and I can see the merits of giving the Sims more focused gameplay experience. I just think that they may have gone too far in a linear direction.

The most frustrating problem by far doesn’t have to do with the actual game itself, but a potential hair-pulling bug that I’ve encountered more than once involving the games save feature. For some idiotic reason, the game will not let you save during the games tutorial. Why they do this; I have no clue but It ends up becoming a major problem as there are times when the game will “think” you’re in the “tutorial” when you’re actually hours into the game. This has happened on more than one occasion and I have lost hours of progress because of it. Imagine playing a RPG and find out that you can’t save the game after a couple hours of gameplay because of a bug? Not only will you want to throw your mouse in a rage, but it will completely kill any motivation to even continue the game. I realize that this will probably be fixed in a patch but this is a huge bug that never should have been present in a shipped game.

Graphic-wise, it’s pretty-much what you’d expect out of the Sims. It’s not going to win any awards but that’s fine by me, as this is the type of game that a lot of people are going to want to play on their laptops and cheap desktops, so nobody is expecting Crysis-like graphics. Unfortunately, there’s another bug, this one not game-killing, but still annoying: characters hair will randomly disappear and reappear. Music is also predictable but stuff that you’ll probably hear in a Renaissance Fair. Once again, nothing award winning but serviceable.

Overall the Sims Medieval has the odd distinction of being a potentially great game that’s held back by a couple of questionable decisions. While there can be a lot of fun in building your kingdom and decorating your property, in order to take full advantage of that you’ll have to go through a quest system that more often than not isn’t very fun. Some of the quests have humorous results but actually playing them is on par with playing a point-and-click adventure while only having one-maybe two decisions. The second is obviously the game save bug; but I’m sure that can be taken care of in a patch….soon I hope (I’ve still have yet to figure out why they would restrict you from saving at all?).

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