Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City Game Review and Game Download
Game Review by Jonathan Tran
Game Rating = 3.5/5 Balls
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Take two parts Civilization, two parts The Sims, and one part Animal Crossing, and you’ll understand the fun and frustrations of Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City.
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Following up on the successes of the game’s first two installments, Last Day of Work’s third iteration tasks the player with caring for a new batch of generic, attractive, white villagers. As the introductory movie explains, your tribe’s efforts were so successful the last time around that they’ve run out of room for their population, and stumble upon a mysterious city while searching for new land.
Your goals are simple: expand the population, keep everyone happy, and unlock the city’s secrets. All of these actions are performed by dragging and dropping villagers onto whatever you want them to do. Want firewood? Drop Tikulu on a stack of wood. Want to collect rare seashells? Drop Mbina on them as they appear. Want some babies? Drop Tikulu on Mbina and wait for them to get it on. The easy controls make the adventure seem simple.
But don’t let your guard down; Virtual Villagers 3 is not a cakewalk. The game runs in real time, even when you’re not playing, similar to Animal Crossing or EVE Online. While this means you don’t have to dote on every detail constantly, you do have to worry that your villagers can die while you’re away. It also means the developers designed exceedingly long completion times for tasks.
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For instance, I set two villagers to repair a hut, and after an hour (at the fastest game speed setting) it was only 5% complete. Granted, if I played the game once a day the hut would be in two or three game sessions. But the problem with designing a game that runs itself is that there isn’t much to do. The villagers perform tasks so slowly that most of the gameplay past the tutorial involves not playing the game, in the hopes that a cool surprise will await you when you come back. In one instance, I returned to the game to find out one of my farmers destroyed our only new source of food. Awesome!
That said, the game has appeal. It features cute character sprites and villagers that learn and inherit traits from their parents. The music is pleasant, and the sound effects are realistic, if not a bit repetitive. The interface is very professional, though the main screen is a bit small. Overall the game is pleasant, and you’ll never feel like you’re fighting the controls or camera.
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Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City is a long, deep game, designed to take hundreds of hours to unlock all of its achievements. If you’d enjoy a simple simulation that’s best played for a couple minutes each day, the sheer number of events and secrets will be worthwhile. Just keep in mind that without a way to accelerate the gameplay, the Secret City’s mysteries will allude even the best gamer for months, if not longer.
System Requirements:
Windows 2000,ME,XP,Vista
Download size: 50MB
Direct X 7.0 or later
256 MB of RAM
700 MHz Processor
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Last Day at Work Created and Published Virtual Villagers 3: Secret City
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