The Simpsons Get Their Own Sims-Styled Game But Is It Woo-Hoo Worthy?

Posted 7 months ago By - Michael Dulson

The Simpsons, everyone’s favorite yellow family for nearly 25 years now, have made an appearance in just about every type of media, from TV and music albums to comic books and the movies, and also many video games. It’s hard to not find the Simpsons somewhere or in something these days. There are two Simpsons games to download on the App Store, but for now, I’m taking a look at the free to play Sim-styled game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which has made it’s way back after being taken down from the App Store awhile back.

The game starts out with an intro video showing Homer playing on his “myPad”. Somehow he lets the nuclear plant explode, and all of Springfield’s residents and buildings get blown away, leaving it up to you to rebuild Springfield. This is where the game really shined for me as the entire experience felt like an interactive episode of the show. You can interact with all of the fan-favorite characters (who are all voiced by the show’s actual cast), and more characters show up as you level up and progress. However, leveling up and progressing is it is extremely slow. To level up, you’d need a certain amount of XP, and you get very little from completing missions, such as making the characters do random tasks, collecting taxes, and so on. It made the whole experience slow and tedious (staying on level 9 for more than half a week was brutal).

"Any fan of the classic yellow family should feel right at home with the title."

Since Tapped Out is a free-to-play game, you just know that there are in-app purchases right around the corner. Unfortunately this game is chock full of in-game currency problems, which really bugged me. There are two in-game currencies, donuts and money. Donuts are only obtained through leveling up and you get very few when you do (exasperated by the already slow leveling). Donuts are used to purchase select items, buildings and characters such as the Springfield sign, Moleman, this list goes on, and there is NO other way to purchase these items. The in-game money can be used to purchase the other items and buildings. I hate the fact that to make your vision of Springfield come together faster, you have to open up your wallet. I would have like to have seen all of the landmarks and characters available for purchase via both or just one of the in-game currency models.

The two last things that bugged me about Tapped Out is that the game only works when there is a constant WiFi connection, which can be a real issue since not all mobile users are always near a WiFi hot spot (myself included). Also to play Tapped Out, you have to sign yourself up for EA’s Origin service. I’m not big on signing myself up for programs and services that I’m rarely going to use. EA shouldn’t make you sign up to play Tapped Out and there should be both an offline and online mode.

Final Focus

Despite all the in-game currency problems, a need of WiFi to play, slow pacing, and to sign up for Origin to play, The Simpson’s Tapped Out is a fun Sim-styled title which feels like you’re interacting with an episode. Any fan of the classic yellow family should feel right at home with the title. If you still love the Simpsons after all these years, then check out Tapped Out on the App Store!