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The objects available help satisfy your workers in different ways. Exercise equipment will help them when they're feeling sporty, while paintings will help them when they need a bit of culture. Your lawyers walk around and look at stuff, and they barely ever work unless you tell them to. The workplace scenario seems entirely tacked on, and there's no real simulation other than earning money for winning cases. You don't have to manage payrolls or hire new people--you just have to get them to tickle each other's feet, or avoid tickling if the scenario demands it.
And this may be the biggest problem with the game. The Sims was interesting and fun primarily because it gave you so much freedom with developing the personalities and relationships between the various characters. The Partners gives you much less freedom. Certain characters will just be mean, and others will flirt constantly with everyone. You will need to keep one lawyer from flirting with another, or help two of them hook up. It's an interesting attempt to create a soap opera with The Sims as a model, but the fact is, The Sims was already a great little soap opera on its own. The Partners does contain a mode that lets you play without constraints, but it seems pretty pointless when there's another, better game almost exactly like it that most people already own.
The Partners also misses the charm of the game that inspired it. The music is decent, consisting of a sort of ongoing sit-com-inspired soundtrack that isn't overbearing. However, the dialogue--the same sort of nonsensical mumbling found in The Sims--is less charming, if only because it sounds like someone grunting into a poorly placed microphone. At least The Partners looks fairly good, especially the skyscraper offices that allow you to scroll past the walls and look down on the streets far below.
It's a sad truth that great success leads to imitation. That imitation can pave a road from Doom to Half-Life, or from Dune II to Starcraft, but there are plenty of Chasms and Conquest Earths along the way. It's a sure bet that there will be countless Sims clones in the next few years. The Partners is one of the first, and it could turn out to be one of the most blatant. That's not to say it's a bad choice for someone who absolutely loves The Sims. There are enough variations to make it mildly different, and, if nothing else, you can pretend you're seeing your sims at their day job. But chances are you'll want to get back to their home life before too long.
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