Sims 3 Review (PC)

I’ve been playing The Sims 3 every day since its release. I love it!

I know I’m usually the one going “narrative, blah blah, games need plot, blah, characterisation, blah blah blah…” Screw it. These are not hard and fast rules. I like virtual dollhouses open-ended simulations too.

In a nutshell, The Sims 3 is The Sims 2 only more awesome. Here are just some of the annoyances that they’ve fixed:

• Lives were too short: When I wanted to focus on career or relationships, my sim would insist on aging and dying. It takes time to build up all those logic and charsima points while trying not to set fire to your dinner! Now you have the option to give your sim a double-length lifespan or switch off aging entirely.



• Customisation: You can now put a custom skin on everything. Should you, for some obscure reason, wish to have suite of cow-print kitchen appliances, there’s no need to trawl websites looking. You can go straight into the Design function, chose from a huge range of textures and pick the colours you want. Or you could download them from my Sims 3 studio ;)
• Other sims are no longer a mystery: In 2, you could talk about certain subjects but you’d have to squint at the speech bubbles to see reactions and track inter-sim relationships, likes and dislikes by yourself. Yeah, right. I’d just guess and occasionally kill a friendship outright by flirting with the wrong person. Now you can discover traits, partners and jobs of the other Sims and look them up later when you’re planning parties. No more time wasted ringing people who are at work.



• Mood triggers and timers: Previously, you could sneeze at the wrong time and completely miss what your sim was complaining about. Now there’s a tracker that shows all the things affecting your sims mood and a rough guide as to long until she hits her tolerance threshold. Yep, she’ll still wet herself but you can’t say she didn’t warn you.
• Lifetime rewards are useful: Rather than buying effort-inducing gadgets like the money tree, your reward points are now spent on traits that make the game easier. I wanted a totally career-focused Sim that didn’t care about cooking, but a lot of my free time was still spend preparing food. With the Hardly Hungry trait, she now eats once every three days. Way more time to spend in the gym to become a a super-fit super-spy!

I should be balanced here; it’s not all brilliant. The community areas are smaller. Some of them don’t have interiors at all. I went on a date to a fancy restaurant with a prospective partner. All the camera got to see was the outside of the restaurant while the meal progress bar ticked away. Even so, it’s nice to be able to wander around the town watching other Sims living their little SimLives.

Content creation is limited to reskinning, so you can’t build your own custom items. It also seems to me that there are fewer interesting models of each appliance/furniture available out of the box. Everythings so far is very… conservatively designed. As in, they mostly look like furniture you’d find in Argos. Hopefully some more outlandish stuff will turn up in the online store over the next few months.

On balance though, it’s the Sims 2 upgraded, with lots of usability tweaks. Exactly what the franchise needed.

Screenshots

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