MySims SkyHeroes Review

A simple game that sucks all the fun out of itself with mindless repetition and frustrating AI.

The MySims series was created in 2007 as a cuter, simpler spin-off of the beloved Sims series. The latest installment of the adventures of people with giant heads comes in the form of an aerial simulation in which you can create your own character, build your own plane, stick the former into the latter and fly off to shoot at people. It's a simple concept that could have easily been fun but somehow managed to be monotonous.

The first disappointment came to light when I realized that there were only about ten options for hairstyles and clothing instead of the variety present in mainstream Sims games. I delight in playing dress-up with my virtual character, whether in Sims or Mass Effect. In MySims SkyHeroes, you don't even get to unlock new clothing items as the game progresses. Designing the plane is a little more elaborate, and you do pick up new plane parts along the way, but the upgrade system is completely tacked on. You would think that, like in many games, certain parts would give you a boost to speed but a penalty to steering, so that you could choose your parts based on your play style. Instead, you get all one-star parts at the beginning of the game, and after a single mission one third of the way through, you get a bunch of two-star parts so that all of your three attributes are now two stars. Why bother even having an upgrade system? The only fun part of all this was naming my Sim and my plane. So I stuck Admiral Pants into Doombringer and kicked off the story mode.

The MySims games, unlike their predecessors, have substantial stories that the one-player modes are built around. SkyHeroes started off by introducing the antagonist, Morcubus, who responds to some bad news by proclaiming, "Ahhhh, bloogle fruppen!". Then the game goes on to tell you that your character is a skilled pilot who crashed near the secret base of a rebel force who is fighting against Morcubus. Of course, Admiral Pants has amnesia. I correctly guessed the plot twist about six seconds into the dialogue. Seven seconds in, it became apparent that the game's writers were trying really hard to be funny, and yet I wasn't laughing. I know the game is designed for kids, but I've always thought my sense of humor to be pretty juvenile, so this seemed like a bad sign. Near the end of the game, it did get a little funnier, but by then I was too bored with the gameplay to be in the mood for child-appropriate banter. The entire story mode got a total of three chuckles out of me.

The actual gameplay of SkyHeroes is pretty fun at first. The controls are simple and intuitive. The plane comes with a machine gun and a bottomless missile launcher, plus there are power-ups scattered throughout the airspace to make things more interesting. Nothing too clever here - just your standard multi-missiles, laser beams, mines, shields, and so on, but they all work well. I would imagine that online play with up to ten players would be a good time. The problem is, the online community is essentially dead. I tried playing standard multiplayer with a friend, and it was fun for a little while. Unfortunately, once my friend got used to the controls, we ended up circling each other, barely able to get a shot off. This got old pretty fast.

The campaign is so full of problems that by the end of the game every bit of fun has been strangled out of the simple, intuitive controls. First, the game is stupidly repetitive. You will be playing one of two types of mission almost every single time: dogfight or race. It doesn't matter what the context of the mission - it's always the same. Occasionally you will get a boss fight that involves blowing things up and/or fighting harder enemies, but these are about four out of fifty missions. What's really frustrating about the repetitive gameplay is that it didn't have to be repetitive. The story behind one of the races is that you're trying to slow down your enemies as your allies escape. So why am I racing? It would make a lot more sense for the game to require you to stay behind the bad guys and shoot them down a certain amount of times before reaching the finish line. I came up with so many ideas for breaking up the game's monotony that I couldn't help but feel angered at the developers. SkyHeroes reeks of those games based off of movies - hastily thrown together to try and wring another buck out of a franchise.