View All (18)

Both fans and foes of The Sims should definitely enjoy this strategy game.

With only a quick first glance, The Partners may appear to be a rip-off of The Sims. The concept of controlling a person’s life and directing them how to act with others definitely seems rehashed. However, after playing The Partners and fumbling through the subtleties of the game, I found it to shine through with enough of its own personality that the comparisons to The Sims became less and less relevant.

The major task of the game is to control the operations of a single law firm. You can choose between three firms from the main menu and get into the game immediately or go through a tutorial which will get you comfortable with the controls and interface of the game.

Once the game has loaded and you’re watching the firm’s employees interact, you have some key decisions to make. Initially, the law firm will have some rooms that are under construction. Once you have enough money, you can purchase the rooms and they will become available for furnishing. You’ll start off with a few rooms immediately and you’ll have to furnish them in a strategic manner – which isn’t so easy due to the myriad of items you can purchase.

The piece of furniture most useful for working is a desk. At desks, your employees can sit down and do work on their cases. Cases are automatically generated for you and sent at different times. Most of the lawsuits are humorous in nature, giving the game a light-hearted feel, rather than forcing gamers to work on banal cases that would take the fun out of the game.

Once you receive a case, you designate one of your lawyers to it. You can assign up to two additional lawyers to that case to better your chances of winning the case and thereby putting more money in your pocket.

Now, if that’s all the game consisted of, it would be quite boring. So, the developers made character interaction a key strategy to the game. Each lawyer has needs (i.e. success, love, cultural awareness, sports info, and even sex), as well as relationships to the other employees. Sometimes these attributes, if left unchecked, will get you into trouble with your main objectives. For instance, I wasn’t allowed to have any physical fighting between employees for 14 days in order to win law firm of the year. Several times I missed two characters who had a “scornful” relationship run into each other and start fighting, causing me to lose the game. Fortunately, each new mission is auto-saved for you and you can resume from that point if you forgot to save manually.

The nice part about the characters is that you can manually alter the way they feel toward one another, unless the story-line changes them in some way. I had two characters that started off neutral and grew very close over time after I selected them to perform very kind gestures toward one another. Now they consistently get into heavy petting contests at the office. Other characters’ relationships can deteriorate, causing them to constantly bicker and even physically attack each other. You can force them to get along through manual interaction and even change their behavior toward one another with enough careful attention over time.

Fortunately for you, there are tons of items you can add to the office to help everyone out with their needs. For aggressive characters, you can purchase a punching bag. For the culturally needy, you can buy a chess table or magazine. Several objects can facilitate multiple needs, depending on the character that uses them. As an example, a journal can provide erotic stories for sexual characters, love columns for the hopeless romantics, and even cultural information. TV’s are another object where characters can watch different movies to aid their different needs.

As I mentioned before, you’ll have main objectives throughout your law firm life, while trying to win cases simultaneously. You have to manage having lawyers work on the cases, making sure characters get along and don’t do anything to jeopardize your objectives, and furnish the offices to provide for everyone’s needs. The combination of strategy and simulation works well in this context and the light-hearted/funny objectives keep the game fun.

Technically, there were really no problems with the game. The interface is fairly involved and can be a pain to navigate, but the game was perfectly stable, with no crashes. The graphics were average, but for a game like this, the visual details really aren’t of the utmost importance to the gaming experience. Some of the audio is really silly though – on purpose. The characters don’t actually speak words, they just have mumble tracks, but you’ll get a chuckle out of hearing love songs on the radio or listening to a lawyer sing on a microphone.

The Partners does a lot of things really nicely, keeping it from being completely swallowed in the shadow of The Sims. I was never a fan of The Sims but I found myself really enjoying the gameplay of The Partners. Toying with character’s emotions and needs is definitely a fun experience. If you enjoyed The Sims, I can definitely recommend this game to you. Due to its narrower focus, I’d guess that gamers who aren’t fans of The Sims would find something to enjoy in The Partners.

Reviewed by Brian Federici.