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Genre: Sim

Format: CD

Developer: Last Day of Work

Publisher: Aspyr

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9, 450MHz PowerPC G4/G5 or Intel Mac, 256MB RAM, 1GB hard disk space, and ATI Radeon 8500, NVIDIA Geforce 2 MX, or Intel GMA 950 graphics card

Review Computer: 1.2 GHz PowerPC G4, 1.25 GB RAM, 128 MB ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

Network Feature: None

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Price: $29.95

ESRB Rating: E 10+ (suggestive themes)

Availability: Now

Demo: Play free for one hour (21.09MB)

Official Website: www.aspyr.com

After fleeing a devastating volcanic eruption, a small group of villagers land on the sandy beaches of an island and promptly forget everything they've ever learned about surviving. They're dependent on you to help teach them the skills they need to thrive in their new home by ensuring there's enough food, technology, buildings, children, and more.

At the start of Virtual Villagers, there are six villagers dazed and confused on a lovely island beach with huts and ruins and mysteries. The tutorial shows you how to encourage the villagers to perform certain tasks by picking them up and dropping them on the area they're supposed to work on; such as dropping a villager on a berry bush so they will pick berries so the villagers don't starve. The tutorial shows you how to research for technology points, make a hut, and have children.

This is from where the ESRB rating of Everyone 10+ comes, because the couple embraces (with kissing sounds) and they go inside a hut for some privacy. If you're lucky, you get a child or two or three. If not, you'll just have to try again. Other than this, there's nothing violent or offensive or provocative.

After the tutorial is over, you will have all of your villagers working on a task to ensure the survival of the village. You can watch them work, but there's nothing for you to do because they'll carry out the tasks you assign to them. They'll take breaks on their own, whether to eat or explore, but go back to their job without you being there.

Fortunately, the game continues even when you aren't actively playing. Just be sure to turn down the speed or check up on them because there's nothing like leaving it at double speed overnight and finding most of your villagers dead by starvation since the berry bush ran out of berries and the villagers didn't know what to do.

To get around this unfortunate occurrence, what you have to do is use the technology points that your researchers are earning on new abilities. They're divided into six categories: farming, construction, medicine, technology, fertility and spirituality. Each of them has three levels, with the first level given to you automatically with the other two levels costing many thousands of points each. In this particular case, I had to buy level two farming which would teach my villagers how to plant seeds and harvest crops and would be a much better source of food.

Occasionally, you'll get a random event that can be either good or bad. One time a crate washed up on the beach and inside was a baby, but another time the crate contained a plague that made my villagers sick. Another event had a man come by on a boat asking for seeds; when I gave some to him, he gave me level three medicine technology for free. They're a nice addition to the gameplay, although I would have liked to have seen the events happen more often and have a bigger variety of results.

Basically, gameplay consists of villagers working on farming or fishing to get food, researching to develop the village, building new huts or clearing debris, healing villagers when they're sick, and taking care of babies. Although most of this can be done without your direct involvement (you set preferences for your villagers and they'll automatically return to that task when they get distracted by doing laundry or moving the boulder or relaxing or exercising or any of the other countless reasons they can find to stop doing work), villagers get distracted often and I can't count the times my 70 year-old scientist would slowly wander to the boulder and try to move it.

In addition to maintaining your village, your goal is to uncover the 16 puzzles which require you to have enough levels of technology purchased and trained villagers. The villagers try to lead you to the puzzles by being curious about them, but most of them can't be solved until you've purchased the appropriate level of technology. So, I found their curiosity about the ruins or the strange rock or the boulder annoying because wandering over and looking at it would do absolutely nothing. Furthermore, solving the puzzles does nothing but make your village look a bit different or unlock other puzzles, and doesn't open up or extend gameplay.

After you've completed the puzzles, the game is essentially over. The village can be self-sustaining at this point and doesn't need your direct involvement, so aside from periodically checking up on it or starting a new village at a different difficulty level, there's nothing you can do. Also, you need to have the CD in the drive to play, which strikes me as a pain and unnecessary.

The graphics have a jungle look I liked, although pretty soon your villagers will have a couple of clones because there are only a few styles, and they were a bit too pixelated for my liking. The music and sound effects were minimal, although keeping with the jungle theme. What I didn't like is having to turn down the game volume to almost off and still have to turn my system volume down to prevent the game sound from blasting my speakers.

Virtual Villagers is like solitaire. If you don't have a lot of time to play, you can turn it on and see how your village is doing and what random events you got. But, if you want to be involved in the villagers' lives and have to make lots of decisions to shape those lives, then this isn't the game for you.