Welcome to the world of special agents MySims style. That’s right, the successful line of MySims games from EA just added a new Wii game called MySims Agents to the MySims family today. The story behind Agents is fun and exciting as you take on the role of a secret agent assigned to foil the plots of Morcubus, the evil CEO of MorcuCorp. As you work your way through the beautifully styled scenes in the game, you search for clues and interrogate suspects in an effort to solve a gamut of cases from who stole a little girl’s dog to what the evil Morcubus is really up to. With each case you crack, you unlock all different types of new items ranging from cool secret agent outfits to your own private jet. And, you’re not on your own in this crime-solving world. As you become more experienced as an agent, you get your own headquarters building that you get to decorate and fill with new agents that you recruit to help you in your fight against Morcubus. Here’s a short producer walkthrough of MySims Agents from IGN.com:

What We Liked

In a word, everything. Really! This is hands down the best MySims game in the MySims family. It’s incredibly well-designed, has beautiful graphics, fun and exciting game play, and we loved the dialog between the characters. The game is simple enough to understand and challenging enough that it doesn’t get boring. And in this generation of MySims, the focus is less on “creating” characters and environments and more on solving the cases. We found that to be refreshing and really fun.

The story line itself is really great and our whole family had a good time following around our agents as they tracked down Morcubus. The story is so captivating that our 6-year old has been talking about it non-stop since he started playing it. His imagination has taken off and he’s been talking about sorts of things that Morcubus might be up to.

We were really happy to see that this time around, the game designer really embraced the Wii gaming platform and created interactions in the game that are Wii based, that is, shake the controller to make it do things. The interactions are great.  Whether it’s prying open boxes with your crowbar or levitating objects with more advanced tools, they’re all very inspired and make the best use of the Wii platform.

We also loved the puzzles that are built into the game. Aside from solving the bigger mysteries, you are constantly challenged with smaller puzzles that you must solve to do things like pick a lock, fix Gino’s pizza oven, or repair a robot so you can interrogate him. The puzzles become more challenging as you progress through the game.

The sets, locations, and music in the game are very well done. Together, they give a good sense of place and mood and set the perfect background for the game. Our favorite sets were the disco and the ski chalet. We had a great time shaking it down in the disco.

Why It’s Good for Your Kiddos

This game is rated E for Everyone (Comic Mischief) and we’d have to agree with the rating. We have 3- and 6-year old boys that we tried this game with and we found nothing in the game that was offensive, crude, or violent. There is nothing you’ll need to skip over or cover their eyes for. It’s a very cute game and very well suited to younger kids. The kids loved the story line and especially found the way the characters spoke to be entertaining and funny.

Overall, it doesn’t work very well for our 3-year old. He understood what was going on, but it was just a tad over his head. Now our 6-year old, that’s another story. He dug right in. From building his agent to solving cases, he loved it. He enjoyed reading the dialog between the characters and his favorite thing to do was follow the suspects footprints using his magnifying glass.

Why we really love this game for kids, aside from the overall kid friendliness, is that it actually does something a lot of other video games don’t do. It encourages them to read. That’s right. The characters in the story speak, but they do so in a funny little MySims language that is entertaining, but incomprehensible. And, that’s great because all of the dialog between the characters appears in captions on the screen in plain English. Your kids have to read the dialog to play the game. And they have to comprehend what they are reading to gather clues and information to solve the case. Our 6-year old had no problem keeping up with the reading and found the basic comic-book styling of the captions fun and enjoyable.

The other thing we really liked is that this game teaches your kids deductive logic. As they work through each case, they can gather clues and information that help them solve the case. Now and then, the game “suggests” that you do something like “Hmmm, maybe I should ask Gino about his chimneys”, but it doesn’t automatically do it for you. Your kids have the option to move around and explore whatever they want to, or they can heed the advice and go talk to Gino. Watching the kids’ gears grind and their excitement build as they got closer to solving the case was really great. We let our 6-year progress pretty much unaided and he was able to solve most of the cases.

We mentioned this before, but we also love the puzzles in the game. If you need to pick a lock or analyze a sample, you need to solve a puzzle to do it. No simple “Oh, I’ll pick a lock with this tool”. Your kids have to think hard to solve increasingly more difficult puzzles.

Golden Egg Rating

Overall we give EA MySims Agents 5 out of 5 Golden Eggs for fun game play, a great story line, challenging puzzles, and good interactivity. We love the fact that it is so well suited for younger kids, encourages reading, reading comprehension, deductive reasoning, and problem solving. We would highly recommend this game for Wii owners with children over 6 years old. And oh, by the way, it wasn’t just the kids who loved the game. We’ve been having a great time playing it too!

Win a Free Copy of MySims Agents This Week on Five Hens

To celebrate today’s release of MySims Agents, we are giving away a copy of MySims Agents to FIVE of our lucky readers this week courtesy of Electronic Arts.  Head over here to enter for a chance to win.

MySims Agents Slideshow and Screenshots

Check out the lightbox slideshow below for images of the new MySims Agents. Simply click on a thumbnail to start the slideshow. Details and information for each screenshot are located at the bottom of the image in the slideshow.