With the crushing of The Sims Mobile, it seemed we would be looking at The Sims Labs: Life Together from the angle of it replacing EA and Maxis’ ambitions for the series on mobile.
But, surprise, surprise, it seems that isn’t quite the case as The Sims Labs: Town Stories brings more Sims content to mobile.
Simville
Yes, surprisingly enough there’s another Sims release on mobile mere weeks after Life Together. It’s unclear whether this is the start of a trend and whether we’ll see more under The Sims Labs banner, but it does indicate things aren’t as straightforward as we might’ve assumed.
Town Stories combines SimCity-like city building with more granular Sims interactions beyond simple townies, but not unlike them either. You’ll find yourself interacting with famous faces from the series like Bella Goth, as well as entirely new arrivals such as fashion designer Nichola Vogue and inventor Gizmo Cogspin.
It’s basically the combination of story and gameplay you’d see in a merge or match-three puzzler. You help to restore and grow the town of Plumbrook while slowly cosying up to these Sims and eventually discovering more about them, and the juicy gossip around town to boot.
And if you find the similarities to the cancelled SimsVille interesting, you’re not the only one.
In the lab
It all raises the question of The Sims Labs branding as a whole. My guess is that this is a new way of soft-launching a bunch of different spinoffs without necessarily committing to a full release, hence the ‘lab’ prefix.
Either way, it’s a semi-encouraging sign to see that there’s actual effort going into revitalising the series’ presence outside of just PC and consoles. Mobile is, after all, popular amongst fans and with The Sims Mobile getting cancelled I don’t think I’m alone in speculating about what that meant for the series as a whole.
Is Town Stories going to turn out to be better received than Life Together? We’ll just have to wait and see.
