It might just be us, but we really couldn’t give a stuff whether the little blighters live or die. What’s most gutting is how the characters in the game lack any sort of personality. Whilst the animation is clean and varied enough, all the colours are vaguely horrible and the detailing on the characters and surroundings is hideous. In terms of graphics, Castaway suffers the same fate as a number of 3D DS titles.

All the menus in the game navigate through the stylus and most of the tasks you have to do involve some use of touch-screen shenanigans. It might be obvious, but at least the developer has made a concerted effort to make the very most of the hardware. When you light a fire you rub at the screen and blow into the microphone to make flames, when you catch a fish with your spear you ‘chuck’ your stylus at the fish you want to catch. They ponderously walk everywhere, it takes them about a day to find food and come back (by which time they’ll collapse anyway because they’re too tired to eat) and most of the tasks are about as fulfilling as eating dust. All movement is done by tapping your Sim around the screen. Nothing is helped by the clunky use of the DS. So, that leaves you with an hour of vague tedium and repetition to cope with.

This is only about thirty minutes into the game. Once you have designed your Sim and mucked around on the island a bit, you have pretty much seen all there is to see and done all there is to do. It is very slow paced, very boring and there is very little to do. Whilst we like The Sims well enough (and always will), this just doesn’t feel right.

The sims 2 castaway nds