3.5/5 ★ – AzulAzuril's review of The Sims 2: Castaway.

This version of the Sims on console is one of the most radically different games in the franchise. Taking place after a shipwreck, you have to play as one of your sims who becomes stranded on an island. It still has the basic Sims gameplay of managing needs with other tasks, but your character now has quest-based goals to help them get home. You gather resources across the island and craft them into tools, supplies, or housing you need to survive. I find this focus on some quests to be a really fun way to enhance the general Sims franchise, and a survival-based setting is a clever way to do that. The game has some fun locales, but I do find the game occasionally becomes a little grindy as you just try to get enough of a given resource to move onto the next task. Conversely, while I find the game grindy at points, I also think the overall experience is a little short, as it’s not too long before you discover a way to escape the islands. I guess a good way to describe it is that the game isn’t very long, but it’s padded by grinding to be longer than it really is. I enjoy the basic gameplay loop, but I sometimes wish there was a bit more variety and even more to discover!