Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
MySims Racing on the Wii brings the world of the MySims into the kart racing realm. You create a racer and a kart and get to work in Speedville solving a mystery of where the best racer in Speedville vanished to. You race traditional kart races or you can perform some quests for your neighbors to increase you popularity in the community.
What’s Hot
There have been many kart racers on the Wii, all with varying success. This MySims entry is the latest and does an adequate job at putting the Sims experience into a game of this genre. The MySims world of Speedville is happy and plucky. There is not an ounce of mean or danger. Kart racing games are usually that way but MySims takes it the next step. They kept the relationships fully intact but they revolve around doing races or completing things like time challenges. When the gameplay is offered this way, it is almost reminiscent of Diddy Kong Racing on the Nintendo 64 because it shakes up the menu driven access to a circuit of race courses.
Mechanics-wise, the game is fairly solid. The controls are just fine and there are a few nods to the Wii-mote with a bit of waggling but nothing overdone. The tracks are your standard kart racing fare and offer some hairpin turns and subtle shortcuts. You aren’t going to find any deviation from the standard, tried and true kart racing formula.
What’s Not
MySims starts you off slowly. Like you have never played a kart racing game before. You’ll try all the elementary gameplay mechanics and get used to the controls and how the karts handle. Before you get into your first full race, you will have toyed around with the basics and you’ll be salivating to get to the starting line. When you do get to the starting line, it might not even be a real race but some sort of time trial. Not that diversifying the gameplay is a bad thing, just the way it is handled. It would be nice to have the choice to only race the way you want to. To a degree, you can but you’re saddled with F-Energy points you must collect if you want to get more collectible pieces and the only way to get tons is by picking up missions from your neighbors and leading you into all kinds of play.
All the modes and methods of gameplay aren’t anything really special or new. If you have played a game like Mario Kart in the past few years, you’ll likely have played a much similar fare, apart from the character interactions. MySims does its best to emulate the success of past games but never hits the same plateau. Not for a lack of trying because the game was heading in the direction of being more than what is pressed on the disc. It just feels like there wasn’t that last layer of polish that could have made this game stand out.
Final Word
There is a lot of competition in the kart racing genre, especially with the biggest elephant in the room, Mario Kart, looming over all the heads of any challenger. MySims is an okay game in many respects but there are other, more worthy kart racing titles that have done the same song and dance much better without getting diluted with trying to cultivate friendships in a racing game.
