The Sisters, or ‘Les Sisters’, is a comic book that is hugely popular in its native France, but hasn’t made much of an impression on our shores. It’s about two sisters – Wendy, the oldest, and Maureen, the youngest – who both love and hate each other. They can’t help but rub each other up the wrong way, no matter how well-intentioned they originally were. Which sounds like roughly 90% of all sisterly relationships.
The plot of The Sisters 2: Road to Fame follows similar lines. Wendy and Maureen have been gifted a tablet, which immediately means they become social media addicts. Hungry for fame and likes, they challenge each other to a competition to gain the most friends in their hometown. So, off they wearily trudge, desperately tapping up friends, family and randos for their upvote.
We’re not entirely sure whether The Sisters 2: Road to Fame is meant to be a satire of social media zombies or not. We played as Wendy (you get to choose), and she can’t have a single conversation without a ‘like and subscribe!’ at the end. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Mark Zuckerberg in his UFO above the city, gleefully rubbing his hands. But there’s no message, no comeuppance, and barely a single person mentions that the obsession might be unhealthy. We shudder a little, as we think The Sisters 2: Road to Fame condones their behaviour.
With your social media warrior chosen, you head into an open sandbox to play. That surprised us, at least with our knowledge of the first The Sisters game. This isn’t a minigame collection in the traditional sense: it’s a minigame collection that has been tossed to the winds, with each of those games landing separately in corners of a city. You’ve got to find them, and only then complete them. As a game structure, it’s a decent punt at trying something new.
What you focus on is entirely down to you. There’s a fully-featured map to find whichever takes your fancy. You can complete the Games, which are the backbone of The Sisters 2: Road to Fame. Place first in all of these and you’ll get to view the ending and credits. But you can also complete Quests, which are near-identical to the Games, just with some recurring themes. There are metal-detector games where you complete hot-and-cold puzzles for treasures, and there are target practice games where you fire your water pistol at balloons. Finally, there are Collectibles of various creeds, from washing graffiti off buildings to finding lost dogs. These all tend to net you gift vouchers which can buy cosmetics in the local stores.
Wandering the city to find Games and Collectibles is about as fun as listening to Wendy drone on about Facebook. You can walk places, but there’s a grating vibration effect on the screen whenever you do. It gave us a headache. Something is clearly wrong with the walking animation, so hopefully it gets fixed in future patches. It pushed us to use a go-kart or skateboard which was many times better. We could get places without technical hiccups and a whole lot faster, too.
At least we would have, if the world was friendlier. It’s a maze of walls and rivers, so following the in-game prompt is difficult as you’re constantly blocked by stuff. People, benches and all sorts of other detritus get in your way, making it a broken trip. There’s an area of the map that’s a microcosm of all of these issues: you can switch a subsection of the map into night-time mode, but huge holographic walls hem you in, and it’s almost impossible to find a way out – let alone the one person who can switch it back to day-time.
But worse than all of this is the interfaces that simply refuse to work. We wanted our camera inverted, but it reverted back every minute or so. We would set a marker on the map, but our objective marker would resolutely focus on the nearest Quest instead. When in the middle of a Quest, it’s a toss of a dice whether the objective marker will point to what’s needed, or the next-closest Quest instead. We’d go so far to say that the pointer is fundamentally broken.
We wouldn’t quite stretch that ‘broken’ label to the whole game, but it’s close. Because we’ve had the game freeze, been stuck in fences, had to abandon quests that wouldn’t finish, been unable to choose a form of transport, and a myriad of other minor issues. We fumbled and bumbled our way to the end of The Sisters 2: Road to Fame. It wasn’t a smooth ride, and the frustrations made us tear raggedy clumps of hair out of our heads.
There’s salvation in the minigames. They’re not the most innovative, which was particularly true for us, as we have played a LOT of minigame collections in the past week (Survivor: Castaway Island and DreamWorks Trolls Rescue Remix being the two most recent). The ones here don’t rank particularly highly in terms of ‘trying new stuff out’ as we’ve played them elsewhere just this week. There’s an arena where you ram players off edges; there’s a rhythm action one where you follow the beat of the music; and a fair few simple races.
But they work – Hallelujah! – which we weren’t taking for granted at all. We wondered if a different team was dedicated to the minigame stuff, as it just felt so much more robust and well-made. A few of them were even memorable. We liked one in a cinema, where you’re told which seats net the big points, before audience members come in and sit in roughly half the seats. Can you remember which of the empty seats had the highest scores? We were rubbish at it.
We wish the hit-rate in terms of quality was higher. The Sisters 2: Road to Fame relies on too many terrible race sequences, and whenever the water pistol is used we sighed inwardly. We had inverted controls (when it worked), and the arc on the pistol was controlled by the same analogue stick as the ‘look’. That meant when we fired up, Wendy looked down. No sniper wants to be staring at their feet when they fire. It’s a clumsy, rotten bit of equipment, but the game is reliant on it.
You should have seen our faces when we finished The Sisters 2: Road to Fame. We were elated. Not in a good way, of course: we were just happy to see the back of it. Because The Sisters 2: Road to Fame alternates between being awkward to navigate and fundamentally broken, which aren’t the best two outcomes in the world. We could make excuses for it and say the minigames are fine, but ‘fine’ isn’t going to make us cough up £33.49.
Having played and reviewed several of the kids games that are releasing at the tail-end of this year, ready for Christmas, we can say with confidence that The Sisters 2: Road to Fame is not the one you should be buying. Treat yourself to one that feels, well, finished.
