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Review:

16th September 2002:
Beach Life
Create your own holiday resort, then watch your innocent tourists drown, become ill and beg to go home in this latest simulation title from Eidos!
Posted by Marc Hull - PC - UK and Europe

Ever since titles like Populous emerged many years ago, 'God games' have encouraged gamers to forget about daily etiquette, and instead be as nice, or as nasty, as they want to hundreds, if not thousands, of little virtual people. Yes, we've sent them to theme parks and let them get on rides that we all knew were unsafe, made them wait for ages in hospital corridors before giving them the wrong medication, and even secretly watched the most intimate aspects of their daily lives, all in the name of fun. So, to help relieve them from the stresses of being controlled by evil gamers, you can now give them a well-deserved holiday with Eidos' Beach Life. Of course, what happens to them during their vacation is up to you.

Like Bullfrog's Theme Park, you are given a site upon which you have to build new attractions for your guests, and attempt to ensure their happiness. However, unlike other games of this genre where there is no 'end', Beach Life is split up into various scenarios, each with a partly prefabricated resort in place and clear objectives to be completed. These tasks range from simply finishing the resort by constructing the remaining buildings to making sure the place has a certain star rating by a certain day. For those who like the freedom to continue developing their site forever, though, you do get the option to continue after the objectives have been completed, and there's also a Sandbox mode where you are free to create whatever holiday-park you like.

Although not as deep or complicated as some God games out there, Beach Life does contain an impressive number of buildings and rides for you to place around your resort. You can customise certain attractions by raising or lowering their prices, or further by altering details like the type of beer sold, and how watered down it is. You can also hire and fire a wide range of staff, including Builders, Cleaners, Holiday Reps and Security Guards, and also set attributes like their salaries, working hours and daily jobs. Of course, the main aim of the game is to create a successful resort, keeping your visitors happy so that they keep spending their hard-earned cash on your attractions, allowing you to build new and better ones. To accomplish this, there's a running 'ticker' that gives you hints about what your guests are unhappy about and also what they like, so you know which areas of your resort are working, and which need to be worked on. Of course, addressing issues isn't always straight-forward, and one of the early challenges is to clear up an island that's covered in litter. Instinctively, you'll probably build Cleaning Shacks, hire lots of Cleaners and send them on their merry way, but that's a very slow and expensive process, and sometimes the amount of litter being dropped outweighs the amount being picked up every day. So, you also have to position litter bins in the worse-affected areas, and if worse comes to worse, increase the cost of food to the point where no-one wants to buy any. Making sure you have plenty of toilets dotted around the place, and a working water-cleaning facility, will also help reduce the amount of bodily fluids that get deposited onto your nice, clean pathways.

The detail level in Beach Life is somewhere between Theme Park and The Sims; while every guest has their own life and agenda, there aren't hundreds of settings allowing you to alter every facet of their daily lives. However, for most people the game will have the perfect balance between complexity and simplicity. You will never feel that events are beyond your control, and you'll rarely find a situation where you don't know what you need to do. At the same time, though, you can still click on any visitor and find out what they think of your resort, including their last three thoughts, which most of the time are very entertaining. The game also makes it easy to see what they do and don't like, with smilies or frownies appearing after they've been to a place indicating their satisfaction.

Graphically, although not in realtime 3D, the game does an excellent job of recreating that holiday atmosphere through it's exotic locations, and nicely animated buildings. You view everything from an isometric perspective, which gives you a perfect view most of the time, and view controls allow you to zoom in or out, although the detail level seems to remain unchanged when you do this. The environment changes from day to night, with all the lights turning on when it gets dark, illuminating the resort, and weather is also simulated, including rain, snow and heat-wave effects. However, the stars of the show have to be the virtual inhabitants themselves, who are not only highly varied in terms of appearance, but also have a massive number of animations for the various situations they'll get into. Although the developers claim that only a P200 is needed to run Beach Life, we experienced slow-down in places on our 950 MHz machine, so we recommend at least a P500 with a good graphics card to avoid things getting messy when there are lots of people on-screen.

Beach Life has loads of nice sound effects that fade in and out when you move over certain parts of the island. For instance, move over a crowd of people and you'll hear them all chatting to one another, and the tone of voice will indicate whether they're happy or angry. Most of the buildings also have their own sounds, such as the sizzle of the beach barbecue or the whirring of the on-site power generators, providing a great overall atmosphere. An equal amount of attention has been spent on the background music, which is provided through the game's own MP3 player. As well as coming with a range of great tracks that not only suit the game, but change depending on the time of day, you can also configure the player to play your own selection of MP3 files too.

While veterans of the genre may find some aspects of Beach Life over-simplified, most will love the game's gentle learning curve. The interface, for the most part, both looks pretty and is very easy to understand, making most options only a few clicks away. It's also suprising how far you can go to customise your island, with every little bush, lamp and bench being a separate object that you can place or remove. However, as with most games of this type, sometimes things just don't seem to happen fast enough, especially when you're waiting for more cash to flow in so that you can build some more attractions. There is a speed setting, which ranges from normal pace to ridiculously fast, but often you'll feel that the game needs to run at normal speed so that you don't miss daily chores, such as making sure the loos are kept clean. The other problem is staff allocation, which is sometimes a bit tricky to control. Sometimes there'll be a problem that you'll need a member of staff to attend straight away, such as cleaning a large amount of litter that's on the beach, but there doesn't seem to be any way of alerting all the cleaners to this spot, so instead you have to click on each one and command them individually. It's only a minor irritation, but can sometimes ruin your chances of success on litter-intensive islands.

In terms of length, rating this type of game is always difficult because you can effectively go on forever, building better and better resorts. However, based on the number of scenarios and the time it takes to complete each one, Beach Life will probably keep you enthralled for weeks. Even once you've got past the training missions and learnt the basics of the game, new attractions open up to you all the time, and it's this constant stream of new stuff that gives the game its addictiveness.

Overall, Beach Life is a really fun game to play, and anyone who loved Theme Park will probably find the same level of enjoyment here. Graphically, while not realtime 3D, it's a step up from most of the 2D titles out there, and the other aspects of the title are also just as accomplished. If you want a change from the usual stream of strategy titles or first-person-shooters that are appearing on PC these days, this may very well be the game for you.

Marc Hull

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Review Summary:

It may borrow a lot from titles like Theme Park, but Beach Life also provides its own level of innovation too. The game looks and sounds great, and will provide you with weeks of entertainment. Overall, well worth buying.

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