The Smurfs (3DS)

While a game based on the Smurfs franchise to the point it simply has the name The Smurfs sounds like it would probably focus on the activities of the little blue people with names that often match their favorite things to do, the simple title actually hides that the major focus isn’t so much on the Smurfs but the village of mushroom-shaped buildings they live in. An important part of the Smurf lore as the Smurf village’s isolation from the modern world is what has helped it survive in secrecy, The Smurfs on 3DS is not an action platformer or anything of the like. The Smurfs is actually a city-building game by way of minigames.

 

On an unassuming day the Smurf village is left in shambles by a mysterious assailant, the village elder Papa Smurf and the few that didn’t flee in the mayhem left behind to regroup and uncover the truth behind what destroyed their homes. However, while that mystery is certainly important to solve, the more pressing matter is the mushroom-shaped homes of every little citizen of the village has been reduced to rubble, the Smurfs needing to band together to start building structures, gathering resources, and drawing back important citizens to the town after they had run off into the forest in fear.

 

Many familiar Smurf characters all make appearances with major recognizable ones like Papa Smurf, Smurfette, and Brainy Smurf all present close to the start of your village building work and many others both familiar and lesser known showing up as your village starts to take shape. As their often deliberately one-note personalities would imply you won’t be getting too much from each new citizen beyond them talking about how they can contribute, although some like Grouchy Smurf are at least given silly running gags that they inject into conversations so the dialogue isn’t just discussing practical matters. One thing that is perhaps taken too far is their word substitution involving the word “Smurf”. In most Smurf media they will use the words Smurf, Smurfed, or Smurfing to replace verbs just as a fun touch and sometimes you’ll get puns involving the Smurf name, but the game goes a little overboard in doing it and sometimes swapping out adjectives and nouns for Smurf, this sometimes meaning a sentence takes a while to parse or requires the next bit of conversation to really interpret. The matters at hand are rarely complicated so brief confusion on a single sentence doesn’t really hurt the broader understanding, but this could hurt comprehension for particularly young players due to the overindulgence in word swapping.

Interestingly enough though, while this game’s young audience probably isn’t expecting a city builder, it is actually a fairly sound candidate for “baby’s first city builder”. The Smurfs for 3DS lays out a small set of core construction tasks you’ll need to complete at with no external pressures on the time needed to do so and there is no overall city management to concern yourself with. However, the process of getting the Smurf village up and running does have quite a few considerations to give it a bit of substance. You are often asked to build a house for a character in one of a few preapproved spots, these characters often providing some extra service once they join the crew like Papa Smurf’s house letting you view the collectibles you get as extra bonuses for completing work. Some areas are vital for collecting resources or making story progress though, but the act of building them isn’t as simple as saying you want to place a building down. You’ll first need to gather the resources by playing a few minigames, and as you make progress in the game you can start playing minigames that bolster your workforce’s morale so that jobs can be finished with less resources spent and fewer building minigames played. You can later cook food for special temporary boosts to efficiency in the resource gathering games and even brew potions that can be used before a minigame to add a bit of an extra challenge to it so the work on a building can be completed in fewer overall minigames. Even just building some of the optional decor around town pays off with not just an improvement to the village’s visual identity but you will also have the meter for the Smurfs’ maximum morale increase by adding them.

 

This leads to The Smurfs on 3DS having the kinds of little management considerations you’d expect from a deeper city builder or time management game but sanded down effectively to make them accessible to a younger audience. A child can just push their way through eventually even if they don’t understand how to make the work take less time, but with a bit more thought they can realize that playing a morale boosting minigame before going to chop wood or mine for materials will pay off with more resources, or that they should be careful in working on a building if it might use up morale despite it already being close enough to completion the boost wouldn’t help them there. You can make small but informed decisions on what you should be doing and gradually make a schedule of how you want to approach the simple but still somewhat layered projects. Optional tasks provide additional benefits while the core projects provide small game-changers to the considerations you’re making, so while nothing is particularly difficult, it does stimulate your brain a bit to be figuring out your work plans, executing them, and adjusting them based on how your resources are holding up.

 

The minigames were likely meant to be the main focus of the experience though as the city building is often an excuse to go engage with them in some form. Almost all of these involve the touch screen or 3DS’s microphone in some way and require a bit of attentiveness to make sure things go optimally. For example, the plank cutting necessary for all city building projects involves the lumber being thrown into the air and you need to slash it before it falls off screen, but the window for doing so is generous enough that children shouldn’t struggle with it while more experienced players still can see a bit of engagement is required or else you won’t be quite as productive with the minigame as you could be. The mine is probably the better example of where sometimes you need to be more thoughtful in how you play the minigame as once the rocks are broken out of the wall on the top screen you need to move your cart around below to catch them, sometimes being unable to grab them all and trying to figure out quickly the optimal way to drag the cart around to catch what you need.

It is a bit of a shame a few too many games are tied to either story progress, morale boosting, or less important tasks like making food for those small but not fully necessary boosts. The game does start including some deeper minigames like a game where you need to sneak around without arousing the attention of dangerous creatures, the game not only about dragging your footprints safely around the bottom screen to grab goodies but also managing it with the threat of being briefly incapacitated if you don’t stop and wait for danger to pass. A rhythm game, a game where you try to find Smurfs quickly as they pop out of hiding, and the multi-step potion brewing and cooking minigames all diversify the kind of actions you take, although adding blowing leaf litter away to the city clean-up minigame is more microphone gimmickry than something that adds to the small bit of challenge on show.

 

You’ll mostly end up playing a few minigames many times, those being things like the tree cutting game for more lumber, the minigames for nailing that lumber together to build houses, the mine game, and a minigame where you need to arrange stones within the available screen space but their shapes are often pretty conveniently doled out in ways that make it hard to run out of room unless you’re sloppy. However, these games are often not only fairly short but do start getting iterated upon as you get deeper in the game. Cutting the planks and nailing them together soon features nails that are more abundant and require more hits to set in place and the mine that started with digging at obvious points soon has you use a radar to find them, the pick to break them open, and then dynamite to blast out the materials. Doing things in time for these core minigames becomes a bit tighter and sometimes it is less a matter of winning than it is trying to squeeze in just one more tree cut down before time runs out for a bit more efficiency. The potions you can take before a game can add another wrinkle like needing to twist in screws for the house building, but these would have probably worked better as just a normal addition to the evolving minigame format instead of something you won’t get to do too often.

 

The regular minigame designs evolve in difficulty a bit as the game goes on as well too, with ones like the vertically scrolling plane flying minigame even being a fairly decent game of dodging dangers where you can’t reasonably pass through every ring and must try to find a safe way to grab what you can. It should be noted that the minigames mostly achieve their job in occupying you more than entertaining you, partly because there is a layer of intentional simplicity to most to make them easy to replay without wearing thin, and the ones that do get more involved like potion brewing are less enjoyable to visit because they are slow and lacking in anything too engaging to carry that extra time devoted to the task. Without the village building framework some of them would be so minimal that you wouldn’t really want to touch them, but the extra benefits from them make it easier to focus and compartmentalize it as part of the job, especially the minigames with variable results that can impact how quickly a job can be done.

THE VERDICT: The Smurfs for 3DS manages to make its sometimes basic and shallow minigames into something more compelling with its city-building focus to add more weight and purpose to them. Their small increase in difficulty as you need to return to them keeps them from growing too repetitive and by having the outcome of the minigame sometimes provide greater resources for the city work it becomes easier to engage with these often quick little activities. While rebuilding Smurf village doesn’t ever get too deep, the work does involve you weighing up your options on what you want to do next while a short story gives it a little more guidance. While certainly best for a young player to see if they like some of the basics of city builder games, the activities in The Smurfs for 3DS do have enough planning involved that they aren’t bad to play for a more experienced gamer.

 

And so, I give The Smurfs for 3DS…

An OKAY rating. You need to do something poorly to be a bad game, and The Smurfs for 3DS does a pretty okay job with its central conceit. You’re rebuilding the little Smurf town and the tasks involved will involve a little labor, the game just transforming that into touch screen minigames that it has the good sense to lightly evolve while keeping simple enough that replaying them doesn’t demand too much time. A few minigames outside of the core work aren’t as fortunate as they start to demand a bit more time or action, but since they are played less they instead give you doses of variety between the resource gathering and construction associated ones. Things like managing resources and picking which tasks to engage with based on how they are important to supporting others start to tap into the appeal of games where you build and manage a small civilization but The Smurfs never dives too deep into more detailed or demanding work, keeping it breezy enough for young players but still having the core elements needed so you have something to chew on.

 

The story of The Smurfs doesn’t take too long to complete nor does the village, and the space to customize things is probably too small to justify going through it all again, but that first go through where you are figuring out what destroyed Smurf village while also rebuilding it is a decent time since it’s just involved enough in terms of the actual actions taken. I’m not sure there’s many people looking for a Smurfs village-building minigame collection specifically and all three components of such an odd combination could probably be better explored in a more focused title, but the mixture here is sound even if it only provides the basic appeals of the elements it chooses to include. Rather than a catastrosmurf, which yes, is a word the game uses, this licensed Smurfs game provides a tiny bit of entertainment with its unexpected concept.