The cutthroat competition of a law firm serves as the setting for The Partners, where action and intrigue is determined by the player's manipulation of 20 lawyers, intermingling their needs of love, lust, seduction, success, rest, sport, friendship, beauty, and culture. More than 100 character interactions and 250 workday actions generate unexpected results as the intricacies of mixing personalities within this TV series-like "soap opera" are explored. Characters run the gamut from manic-depressives to playboys with actions ranging from fights and love affairs to back stabbing and personality disorders.
More than a simple game of social interaction, progress in The Partners requires selecting and winning lawsuits, furnishing offices and making environments palatable to the various characters, manipulating relationships, buying and selling objects, expanding the firm and more. Three objective-based campaigns (Sea, Tex and Sun, Gordon & Gordon, and Adios and Goodnight) with multiple episodes, a free mode for creating custom scenarios, and hands-on learning tutorials offer varying degrees of immersion.
The Partners is a game that epitomizes all that I found bad about Ally McBeal and tries to unceremoniously cram it into a broken Sims formula. It all starts wrong. An opening cinematic acts as a horrifying prelude to what will ultimately become a mediocre game. I beckoned Dan to come watch it with me. I figured it would brighten his day but he left even sadder than when he came and admitted that the video more embarrassed than anything. And it's true, the singing, the animations, the beat¿ It's all very disturbing and invokes the kind of involuntary smile we might see on a boy who just stumbled upon his grossly overweight and hairy father mowing the lawn in his underwear while regaling a neighbor with stories of how he once wrestled a bear and invented the calculator. All at once it's a very sad, funny, and embarrassing site. But the rest of the game isn't so bad.
Looking at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint, The Partners is actually a bit better than The Sims in a lot of respects. Foremost, the world of The Partners is an entirely 3D one that can be rotated and zoomed. But that's where it stops, everything else is decidedly Sims, which is now decidedly dated.
Characters are angular assemblages of polygons and backgrounds are bland or cluttered with indiscernible objects. Even though they exhibit a plethora of animation routines (250 object actions and around 100 character interactions, I think), sometimes the people and interactive objects of the game world seem to start and stop at the wrong times and transition from one movement into another rather slowly and jerkily. The addition of the 3D buildings outside of your own penthouse office is cool, but the dynamic lighting and fancy effects we've seen in so many renders that were supposedly representative of the actual game have been completely lost.
But it's the unpredictable, erratic play with zero customization that really hurts. The lacking tutorial, documentation, and complete absence of options and in-game pointers only compound this underlying problem of illogical, crazy, and tedious gaming.
So what I'm playing and you're reading is like The Sims. There is this environment with people in it. The people have needs, wants, and traits, which can all be altered or catered to depending on what objects the player drops into the world and how the characters interact with these objects and each other. I'll not contest the sheer amount of stuff to do and manage. There are a bunch of objects (not nearly as many as what's now offered in The Sims, of course) and each object has multiple actions that can be applied to it.
Here's the problem: Even though the needs and characteristics of a person may dictate one thing be done to achieve an end, the people will just act absurdly and always out of character, often, if not always, doing things that work against the player. No one will ever work steadily, act predictably, or attempt to fulfill the requirements of an objective while adhering to their own needs and not stressing others. What results is an office full of childish, illogical monkeys that need to be commanded every three seconds if anything is to ever get done. Forcing is really all it is because the actions they carry out with one another are random and blatantly disregard whatever objectives may have been in place (21 missions total).
Force them here, force them there, force them again, and again, and again... Not caring about the happiness and well being of the office peeps is the only way to go. This approach keeps them all on track, working and building the areas of themselves that need to be built. When taken from this strictly "push and shove" perspective (the kind of play the game necessitates for success to be attained), Partners essentially devolves into a rudimentary, uncooperative RTS.
Each objective, like building a certain character's attributes, is accomplished by purchasing the right objects and then constantly forcing the people of the firm into activities related to these objects. There's no strategy or planning because when the objective is complete, you can simply sell the objects, refocus on case work, and wait for the next objective to come rolling down the hill, thus effectively crossing every single bridge as you come to it.
A second ago he was peeing on the plant. Now he's kissing the girl and wishing for an exercise bike. I'll just build a water cooler and force him to use it a thousand times and the objective will be won, provided I meet the time deadline.
And then there's case work... Objects are bought by spending money, money is earned by winning cases, cases are won by simply assigning a person or persons to a case and then constantly reminding them to sit at a desk and work on the case. Clients are invisible and neither behavior nor placement of office furniture has no bearing on anything. And to think, catering to and trying to win incoming clients with a sweet office and general suaveness was actually what I was looking forward to most during the install.
Mute. Learn the word. Know where it can be turned on. As a matter of trivia, the grumbles and mumbles that come from all characters in the game were actually done by mentally disabled mud men. Yup, the mythical swamp dwelling mud men that normally prey on alligators and teenagers busy making out in small fishing boats were enlisted by Monte Cristo to deliver some truly amazing gurgles, gulps, bubbles and moans that are supposed to pass as speech. I can understand taking the Charlie Brown approach, but do they have to sound like they're melting into a puddle of clay while they talk?
Chipper announcer boy, the only perceptible and actually pleasant voice in the game, comes on loud and fast. The sudden painful jars back into an exceedingly loud and cold reality don't help the quieted sound's case, nor does the music (cue gross, fat, hairy dad).
Wrap the package up with a somewhat broken and often unresponsive interface that can't even be helped because there are no apparent options, despite what the instruction manual might say, and you've got The Partners.
The Verdict
With countless Sims expansions pushing an already polished game ever forward into new realms, it's hard to find a place for this brief, lighthearted, and whimsically faulted competition.
The attempt behind The Partners is a noble bit of marketing genius, some would say. Novelly combining a proven game formula (Sims) with an equally successful piece of pop culture (sick lawyer fetish) is a sure fire way to get sales. And, for all intents and purposes, the title could still push a million units despite my downing, negative pontification to the contrary. But popularity does not walk hand-in-hand with quality. And that's what I'm here to say, crow in mouth or not.
Partners isn't terribly, irreproachably broken (opening cinematic not withstanding), it's just clumsy and awkward. The game lacks enough in every single department to be unworthy of a serious player's attention (the gamers who play for the game). Unfortunately, these same pervasive faults are prevalent enough to also frustrate and infuriate the casual gamer, who may not be able to completely see through the title's relationship veil, but will still be able to recognize the erratically behaving characters as entities who are not supposed to act like that.
Because of this myriad of faults, in the end The Partners is just another example of why idea and sales do not always garner praise. Addressing creativity before the technicalities or a product is not always good. And the proof lies within this clumpy pudding.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
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