Having just reviewed the DS version of MySims, I knew exactly what to expect from the Wii version. Or at least I thought I did. But nothing could prepare me for the even more cutesy visuals, the baby voices, or the quirky town life that the Wii version showed me in the first five minutes of playing. We were off to a promising start, and I was glad to call these little buggers MySims.

The character creation comes first and it doesn't disappoint. You can point and click on various body parts to change the clothes that wrap around them, and you click on your eyes and mouth to change the shape and colour of these too, as well personalising your Sim with various accessories that are available from the object menu. It's easy, fast and quite a lot of fun to make a Sim in this unique way, although I found it a little odd how you couldn't select a gender. Instead you just dress your Sim in boy's or girl's clothes, and then change the pitch of the voice until you get something that sounds and looks like your preferred gender! This worries me though - how are MySims supposed to procreate?!

Walking around town and interacting with things is easier than I've ever experienced with The Sims on a console. You run around with the thumbstick on the nunchuck, spin the camera with the d-pad and then click on things to interact with them by pointing your Wiimote at the TV and pressing A. You can talk to a person by clicking on the type of interaction you'd like to perform (which is crucial for making new friends, as everybody has their own personality and likes to be pleased in different ways), you can access your backpack or bring up the map by clicking on the corresponding icons and, best of all, you can interact with things like trees (shaking them to gather fruit) by actually grabbing and shaking your Wiimote while pressing and holding A. Other objects require a simple point and click like the PC versions of The Sims, but on the whole the controls are intuitive, fun, easy to get to grips with and used to their full potential.

But what have you got to gain from acquiring apples, I hear you cry! Well, actually, quite a lot. You see, in MySims you build things. Not just houses either; you actually create furniture and interactive items. To create items you'll need blueprints to create a ghost image of the piece of furniture or the item you want to manufacture in your Workshop. Once the ghost is there, you can use a multitude of different shaped blocks to style the item how you'd like. As long as you fill the ghost image and make sure that the yellow stars are covered with blocks (so that your Sim can interact with it) you can let your creative juices flow free. I was supposed to make a comfy chair for example, but I made it out of stacks of square wood, with a square back rest, and the end result was like some chair you'd find in a church - uncomfortable, upright and unsightly. Only the best for MySims! After you've created your object, you can add things called essences to give your it attributes. You can paint your furniture with essences, or use essences that come in shapes. Adding an apple or two in the shape of a block would make your chair interesting, while adding other essences you can find around the town might add some geek appeal, or suddenly make it hip and cool. If you geekified your new piece of furniture you wouldn't want to give it to the town's Emo - not if you want to do yourself any favours, anyway!

It's safe to say that EA have done a fantastic job at making MySims look top notch, and while it may not be quite next gen, the quirky graphical style is brimming with artistic flair and really suits a Wii game, looking very much like something that Nintendo could have pulled out of their creative minds, rather than - no offence intended - something straight from the EA conveyer belt. Everything looks blocky, a little bit like Lego, so as a consequence, people have square heads and flat feet, all the houses have square corners and the trees in the garden are made up of oblong trunks and green blocks put together in a way that resemble leaves upon leaves. This particular style is bound to appeal to youngsters, but also reaches out to older players who are perhaps tired of playing blood and guts games on rival formats.

Building houses and decorating them is as simple as placing down big blocks to shape your house on the outside and then creating doorways and windows, to let in light and people. Once you've constructed the exterior out of blocks, you can go inside and arrange the furniture that you crafted. Things like walls are erected automatically, but that's okay as MySims takes out the fiddly parts of the construction process while still keeping the overall experience highly customisable. Building houses with essence objects like gargoyles and gnomes will attract people to the town who appreciate gothic symbols, while placing fountains and flowers in your garden might attract a cuter crowd instead. It's interesting to see what brings who to you, giving the game added lasting appeal, because no two games will be the same so long as you obviously don't build the same houses and same furniture or address your neighbours in the same fashion. Everything in the MySims village is dependent on you - no pressure, then.

The story is similar to the DS version in the sense that you want to attract visitors to the town, but the Wii twist is that the architect of the town who could use essence powers to build wonderful things has been gone for a while, so the place has gone downhill and you're another special being who can wield these essence powers too, and you're here to put things right! But then, that's where this Sims game fails to impress me. I hate stories and I hate putting problems right. I don't care about the chef who has no customers - I look after number one. And that's why the PC version of The Sims will always keep me coming back, because it's a game where I can put myself into another world full of more dilemmas that I can handle comically. In the real Sims I can kill people, I can make and break relationships, I can let certain Sims live the life of riley and I can make others suffer for being too pretty - I'm God and you don't need to look far on the PC section of this very site to see that I enjoy being creative with The Sims series on that platform. In MySims, I'm not God. I'm not even Jesus. I just bounce around, helping people and doing what the mayor, or anybody else, tells me to do. Sure, it's fun for a while, and the cute graphics are visually pleasing, but I prefer pleasing myself to pleasing others when it comes to Sims gaming.

Another major gripe that really grinds my gears is the loading times that are persistent throughout the game, not to mention that the Wii is a noisy beast when it comes to loading. Every time you enter a house, enter a mode, or go back outside, you're looking at a good five to ten second load - and you're constantly in and out of decorating mode to move furniture. Not only that, but the game loads on the fly while you're moving throughout the village and talking to people, which causes slowdown and a lot more noise from your Wii. I hate to move my hand over buttons onscreen only for the game to slow down and prevent me from clicking them, and I become reluctant to do anything in the game for fear that the bloody game will go through another tedious load screen. This really bothers an impatient player like me - I'm sure kids won't mind (my sisters certainly didn't) but MySims loses serious points for being so lethargic!

Lots of the loading times probably come from the audio, as many different sound bytes for the various interactions are present and the game world is made up of many more effects and adorable soundtracks that just add to the sweet image. It's great to have excellent audio to compliment the graphical delights, but it's all letdown by shoddy loads that I feel get in the way of helping people, which I believe takes a chunk out of the game's appeal.

I'm really proud that EA put a lot of effort into a Nintendo Wii title and, for the most part, their patience with this title shows. The controls highlight just how diverse and easy to play the Wii can be when it comes to gaming and the little tykes will love decorating their houses with furniture they've crafted with relative ease. Animal Crossing fans will also get a lot from this game - but I fear that regular fans of The Sims might find MySims a bit too simple. However, if simplicity is what EA had in mind here then they certainly nailed it and in doing so they've really broadened the appeal of The Sims to reach even more non-gamers than the original already has. If you have the patience of a saint to compensate for the load times and you're amused at the sheer thought of a clown receiving a face full of pie then MySims is for you. However, if like me you're an impatient, sadistic soul who hunts for the meaning of life rather than worrying about how cool those hipsters are, then maybe MySims shouldn't become YourSims.

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).