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The Partners
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Graphics & Sound:
Imagine a game where character animations are stilted, polygonal bodies are abundant and your main belief in bodily appearance derives from odd jumpy little men and their relationship with household objects. Most modern gamers would automatically ascribe those attributes to the critically acclaimed Sims series of life simulation games. Nevertheless, we can now proudly shout that this definition no longer has only one entry in the dictionary. The Partners, a Sims-like clone, takes all of the major characteristics that gamers loved about The Sims and tries to improve upon it with it's own style and tweaks. Notably, The Partners takes The Sims away from it's isometric two-dimensional graphics set and places characters in a full 3D atmosphere that can be zoomed through multiple levels height ratio, and seen through just about any vantage point attempted. The building that you 'work' in is surrounded by various big city-like landmarks that help set a feeling of place and location while doing business within the singly defined workspace. Sadly, the real 3D feel loses its remarkability when introduced to the character and items used throughout the game. As previously mentioned, actions, appearance, and animation of characters and items bear an unbarring resemblance to the popular life simulator. For those who never played The Sims, the characters are signaturely poorly animated and extremely polygonal in shape, producing a distorted image of real-life. When The Sims was first introduced, these 'problems' were overlooked simply because the game was original. There was nothing to compare it to. However, having now become engrossed in a franchise, The Partners comes off as a mere copycat. Perhaps the 3D world enhances the problematic character visuals beyond an acceptable range. Sound is equally as annoying. As your height and distance from a character decreases, the sounds of mumbling grow slightly more audible. This is quite interesting, until you arrive directly in front of a character to still here low-volume mumblings and gestures that provide no insight to the character or game. It would be nice to hear a few words here and there that were actually comprehendible. However, that is only provided in the introduction screens by a game show host-like narrator. The narrator is especially invigorating, and if not for his occasional word or two upon completion of a campaign task, surely one would begin to wonder if the mumblings were an actual language that just missed an English translation during production. |
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Gameplay:
The Partners attempts to imply that its concept places the 'spirit of a TV series' into the video game setting. You are supposed to believe that your game is a 'soap opera'-like world where the antics of daily work-life are played out inside of a continuous unending workday in a law-office. They even go far enough to provide an opening credit reel that is far worse than that of that 'real' law-office TV series soap opera. Basically, The Partners is set up in four wholly unrelated subsections. The first is a Free Play mode, which allows for unlimited configuration and expansion. The other three sections of play are setup as scenarios, which outline a specific set of requirements to keep your lawyers at bay, satisfied, and working hard. Each scenario has its own set and cast, and progression introduces new lawyers and sets of requirements. Throughout the progression of a scenario, the undertone of Law practice is slightly ever-present. As your only source of income, lawyers must be assigned to cases that pop-up sporadically. Winning a case means a gain in income. However, there is no strategy to winning cases, except constantly forcing your assigned lawyer to 'work on his cases'. There is no client interaction or office meeting, just a lawyer and his workbench (which you must make sure to furnish). In fact, constant force is a recurrent theme in The Partners. As scenarios progress, you will need to make certain attributes prominent by doing actions that make that attribute change. Constant recommitment to commands are the only thing that will keep these lawyers from acting out any of their own unpredictable acts that could completely ruin the scenario, such as urinating into an office plant or playing love games in the presence of the boss. There are over 250 individual actions that a character could randomly enact with 100 interactions between two or more characters. Simply put, a day at the office seems more like a week at the zoo living in the monkey cage with your half-crazy uncle. For those who do not want to deal with Objectives or time constraints, the Free Play mode lets you pre-configure a number of details, such as starting income and number of lawyers. You can even opt to turn off incoming work cases. That being said, the Free Play pays no real attention to any objectives or requirements. This is where the similarities to The Sims are at its most prominent. It almost plays like just another Sims expansion, perhaps 'Sims: At Work'.
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Difficulty:
Each of the three campaigns seems to be of equal difficulty, however, none of these pose too much of a challenge. I was able to complete the first scenario in less than three hours from start to finish in one sitting. Once every objective in a scenario is completed, that scenario is complete. Regrettably, this hinders replayability, and I found that once I finished one scenario, my attention went elsewhere during play of the other two. Eventually, the repetitive nature of forcing a character at every instant became simply disdaining. The Free Play mode was equally as irritating, although I did manage to furnish a nice looking, well run office complete with espresso machine and condom dispenser.
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Game Mechanics:
Thankfully, the point and click interface allows for easy manifestation of those dreaded game play tasks. Navigation and view angles can be positioned quickly and painlessly when a character is out of view. Select a character to move him or force interaction with items or another character. Otherwise characters go about there daily lives, albeit a weird, distorted one, with no need of interaction. Does The Sims have a competitor worthy of taking its crown? Is there room for more expansion in The Sims-like clones? Based on what The Partners takes with it to the batting mound, there are certainly kinks that need to be worked out. The Sims was an overnight success that came about through an act of pure chance. That sort of success cannot be recreated. The Partners is a good game if you want to pretend your Sims have gone to work, but for replayability and depth, The Partners simply lacks that lasting appeal that The Sims used to win its spot in gaming history. |
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-==Boy, GameVortex Communications AKA Kyle Prestenback |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 98/Me/2000/XP, Pentium II 300 Mhz, 600 MB Hard Disc Space, 64MB RAM, 16MB compatible 3D Video card, DirectX 8.1, Windows Compatible Sound Card, 4x CD-Rom drive. |
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Test System:
Windows 2000, AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 128MB RAM, 75GB HD, nVidia Vanta 16MB TNT2 video card, on-board sound, 40x CD-ROM |
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