I have to admit I have never seen this TV show before. I knew the name, I've heard it from somewhere. It seemed to be like some sort of women comedy show - from what I've heard (go figure). And by looking on the back of the box I saw pictures who looked remarkably like Sims. Ohh NOT another one of those Sims clones... Ok - game installed and launched.
In The Beginning...
...there was the loading screen. Boy did I get a chance to look at it well during all the time I reviewed the game! For a game with graphics that barely cover the "3D" description it sure loads a lot. The interesting thing is that it has a trivia while loading, with questions from the series - the questions seemed intriguing but since I knew nothing about the show...
You may think by now that it's a bad game, so I will stop with the criticism a bit, and go to the good part. This game has something! It may very well be that certain something that makes the show running: even though it's a soap opera, there is a dark and mysterious atmosphere around everything that is happening there. Yes, indeed, the game made me look at the TV show. Why is it I find it so remarkable? Because usually these kind of games are addressed to the fans only, to make an extra buck or two.
I may have said it before: for me both the book covers and the content matter. If I was to judge this game like that, I would say: really good content, really bad, hasty covers.
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The main plot is really well written. The game chooses not to assign you with a known series character. Instead, you play a new female character that moves with her family (husband and son) to the fictional Wisteria Lane.
You are NOT prepared
I would say that passed the first look, one could claim that this game isn't just a Sim game. It's quite the opposite in fact. You could actually stick this game more into the Quests category, with RPG elements rather than Sim. The main accent of the game is on story. Many layers are added to your character, and to everyone in your neighborhood with each new "quest" that you complete. Desperate Housewives the game manages to recreate (at least a part of) that dark atmosphere form the TV show - using exactly the same technique as the show - good and unique story telling.
Your character for example states at a moment that she was in a terrible accident and lost her memories, and now she can only remember the past 10 years of her life. Later on she is amazed by how familiar a gun seems to her, and admires it's shape. Things like this make you want to play in order to see what's this all about.
The story is really long and while it's really good and well told as I've said before, the structure and the implementation if it lack a bit, resulting in a bit of boredom right at the end.
The whole Sims element was added to the game just to "fill in the blanks" so to speak. Sure, you can customize your character at the beginning, but the options are rather limited. Sure, you can buy new clothes, but there are only like 3 blouses, skirts or shoes and just the color varies. You can change your dresses every day, but it doesn't really matter, and besides, you will be either blue, pink or white, or well... black if you like it from time to time. Your home obeys the same restrictions: you can change the wallpaper and floor, but you have just a couple of patterns available, but with different color sets. You can also upgrade stuff around the house, like... the couch, the bed, the shower, the dresser and... oh wait! That's about it!
All that and the fact that you can interact with people, discuss and make them like you more helps you a bit to experience a more "real" story.
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Also in the category of "let's fill the time between plot moments" there are a few minigames: gardening and cooking; and if you use your computer - online poker on the Internet, where you can win game money (a very efficient method actually, especially because you can play God mode: save each time you win and load each time you lose; the only catch is the inexplicably long loading times). You can level up in both gardening and cooking. As a personal note I find cooking a very enjoyable fun minigame, but gardening isn't that fun.
An impressive thing to notice is that you can change the outcome of certain scenario elements by choosing to talk or act differently, giving you the impression that you have a choice. I always said that a quest game that gives you choices is good when you don't know how much you can influence the story each time. This is certainly one of those types.
It's frustrating that sometimes, even if you want to act differently you can't do what you chose. In most situations, the dialog is varied enough to include at least part of if not all your thoughts about that matter. However, sometimes you may want to act a bit different - but you cannot.
The computer not only helps you in making money via the poker game, but can also help in some quests - it has a "search engine" and you can "google" various places, persons or other stuff.
Each person on Wisteria Lane has a little secret, that you can uncover by asking about "what's wrong" 3 times basically - but you have to talk a bit in advance with that person in order to get friends first. It's just another fill-up, but it makes you care more for the characters involved.
Okay, I'm gonna talk a bit about the bad parts now. First of all, the graphic is nothing out of the ordinary. You may say "good, I don't need a powerful system". That may be only partially true. The fact that frames drop and the animations are choppy even on a high-end system makes it bad. I had moments when the game would just freeze, and it will unfreeze in 5-10 seconds later for no apparent reason. To make it worse, the AI pathfinding is sometimes terrible. The character is not going where you want to, or just stopping half way. Once my character was moving from point A to point B and half way it decided to "go to bed". It stopped and performed the animation he does when it goes to sleep. All kind of minor bugs make it really annoying sometimes. Another example is that the mouse cursor doesn't change from an hourglass after loading, even if it finished. You have to click on something and choose an action for the cursor to get back to normal.
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My colleagues claim that characters do look similar to the ones in the movie but I say that even if they do, they do it vaguely. I think they could put more accent on the graphics of the characters. You on the other hand, since you are not a real character from the movie, look ok.
The camera is really really annoying, it's stuck on your character and you have to zoom pretty far back sometimes to see what's going on around you, or even to be able to click somewhere in order to move there. This happened so many times I finally got used to it I think...
The music is discrete enough not to be annoying after a while, and the sounds - though not many - do their job properly. The voice acting varies a lot - from really good to mediocre in some cases, but overall the story manages to catch you so they can't be that bad.
There isn't much more left to say, so I'll draw the conclusions now I guess...
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In Conclusion
Although this may seem just another cheap Sims wannabe clone at the beginning, it's a good, fun and enjoyable game, not only by women or the TV series fans. After playing this game I just had to watch the series as well to see what's all this about. It's just my impression that this game was done a bit hasty and they could of done a much better job at least at graphics and animations. It's good though that the accent was put on the story, and thus this game does what was meant for.
Gameplay: 86
Good gameplay because of an interesting long story plot that will draw you in it and make you play for many hours. The minigames aren't that remarkable but cooking is fun, and they all help you spend more time into the game. The bad side is that once you more or less complete all minigames and have enough money you tend to get bored, and the game becomes something like: go there, talk to that, then come back, talk to me again... and so on and so forth...
Graphics: 75
Nothing out of the ordinary, although it is 3D. The fixed camera is really annoying, and you get inexplicably low FPS sometimes, or even freezes. The interface is pretty friendly though.
Multiplayer: N/A
Sound: 79
Again, nothing special, there is something about the music that makes the game a bit more attractive, and voice acting is ok.
Hardware: 74
It will run probably just as good on low-end systems as on high-end ones. The lack of optimization can be seen clearly.
