The Sims 2: Pets (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.1 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Andrew Park
• Reviewed on: 10/17/2006
• Updated on: 10/25/2006
• Released on: 10/17/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: The Sims 2: Pets (PC) Review

The Sims 2 remains a popular and difficult-to-describe strategy game that lets you control the lives of little computer people in the house you build for them, as they love, grow old, have families, chase their dreams, and occasionally use the potty. The series is known for offering zany humor, colorful graphics, a gibberish language that its "sim" characters speak (known as "simlish"), cheerful music, and numerous retail expansion packs. And the most recent expansion, The Sims 2: Pets, doesn't break with tradition, so to speak. It adds domestic dogs, cats, birds, and rodents to The Sims 2, along with plenty of new items. If you weren't already a fan of the series, it seems doubtful that Pets will change your mind, but the expansion still adds plenty of content that will definitely be of interest to experienced players looking to add more to their Sims 2 experience in any way they can.

Pets act as brand-new family members, although hamsters and birds generally stay put in their cages. For these smaller pets, you can feed them; play with them to give your sims some social contact; and in the case of birds, teach them to talk to improve your charisma. Dogs and cats can be much more interesting. You can create canines and felines from a great number of different breeds and are given tons of different customization options that let you choose size, age, different ear types, fur color patterns, and even some minor pet accoutrements, like collars. You can also determine your pet's personality, such as whether your pet is friendly or aloof, neat or messy, and quick to learn new tricks or a bit slower on the draw. If those last sentences got you excited, there's a good chance that The Sims 2: Pets is for you.

That's because pets--dogs and cats, anyway--function like limited people in the game. You can't take direct control of dogs or cats, but you can teach them new skills (pet tricks) by spending virtual hours (which equates to several minutes of real time) of your day training them until they learn how to sit, shake hands, and roll over. This system is similar to how you can improve your sims' marketability by spending virtual hours repeatedly training at skills like charisma, repair, and cleaning. You can use interactions with them to fulfill your sims' social needs (so yes, you can play as a "crazy cat lady" who associates only with her house cats), just like you can with live-in family members. And you can even send your pets off on different career paths. If you care to, you can have Fido pursue an exciting career in show biz, for instance, and just like in the original Sims games, in Pets an increasingly nice car will pull up to your sims' house to pick them up as they climb the professional ladder and whisk them away for hours on end, until they return home later that day with an honest-to-goodness paycheck. These new options open up a slightly different avenue for gameplay than having just another roommate.

Cats and dogs can also interact with each other, and based on the personality you've given them, they may get into fights with the neighbors' pets or get friendly with them, even to the point of building up a relationship that leads to a new litter of puppies or kittens. In the meantime, if you happen to care about your house's property value, your dogs and cats are always works in progress, since you must constantly catch even the best-behaved pets in the act of destroying furniture, digging up the yard, or relieving themselves in the house so that you can scold them--which teaches them not to do such things. (Alternately, if you care to, you can try to breed the biggest jerk of a cat or dog in SimCity by repeatedly praising your pet for destructive behavior and then turning it loose downtown.) Either way, patterning your pets' behavior is surprisingly time consuming and not always convenient--if you want to have a well-behaved pet, you have to always keep an eye on it and constantly drop what you're doing to dash over and scold or praise it--and once you get there, actually giving your pet that feedback takes a little while, too. It also seems to take quite some time before constant scolding or praising sinks in with even the brightest pets...and if you decide to have any of your sims take a job, or to send you pet out to the workforce, that just means less time for your sims to spend together teaching your pets.

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