The Sims 3 Review

Reviewing a sequel to the best selling PC franchise of all time is a risky proposition, especially when yours truly has spent countless hours creating highly detailed houses and hilarious characters in the previous iterations. Luckily, The Sims 3 delivers a satisfying mix of the familiar with a fair number of new features.

As someone who played The Sims and all the original expansion sets, I was initially disappointed when the Sims 2 came out with just the basic game play. With the The Sims 3, I expected this lack of expansion content, but still couldn’t help feeling a little cheated. Where was the weather, the business, the frat parties? The reality is, The Sims 2 with all the expansion packs is a really fun experience. The Sims 3 doesn’t live up to it in terms of gameplay alone, but the extra enhancements add new experiences that make the core Sims 3 experience enjoyable and leave room for amazing expansions down the road.

The game is like its predecessors in all the right ways. The real jewel of the gameplay is in the character interaction. The Sims has always been fun for tossing a bunch of awkward characters into awkward situations. The Sims 3 takes this a big step forward with its wide variety of character traits. What could be more fun than having an inappropriate insane kleptomaniac sim go out on the town with a good romantic perfectionist sim? The wide variety of traits and improved automated conversations lead to an entertaining sit-back-and-watch style of play.

The most influential change in the The Sims is the much anticipated seamless town. Rather than seeing a loading screen every time you go to the store or out with a friend, you can simply zoom out and walk or drive to any location in town. Even on low-end hardware, this part of the game is quite smooth. With a slow computer there is a little extra time waiting for textures to load, but overall the implementation is excellent. When you zoom out, a little icon pops up allowing you to see the town map, or simply press ‘m’ at any time. The new opportunities with this design are not to be underestimated. It is even possible to have homeless sims that subsist on other sims household items and food (being a skilled moocher is even a trait you can choose). New goal oriented missions also expand the gameplay greatly.

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Another excellent change is the way households within the town are managed. The Sims 3 presents a great improvement on the old style of moving sims from house to house. It is finally quite easy to move families around town without affecting their relationships and jobs. You can pick up a family, put them in a “clipboard” and then drop them back into the town without affecting their life. While this change may not be a game changer for some, people who enjoy creating a perfectly planned town will be thrilled with this new ability.

A third very affecting change is the addition of Moodlets and the burying of the traditional needs bars. The bar graphs for needs (such as hunger and bladder) are still present, and getting used to playing without paying attention to them takes some time, but the game becomes much less tedious when you do. Rather than just watching the needs bars decline, your sims’ moodlets are icons (with pop-up descriptions) that show up and inform you when the sim needs to eat, sleep, or any number of other things. As the name implies, these have an effect on your sim’s mood. The pop-up description for each tells you the positive or negative effect and the duration. Now instead of just having a low energy bar and needing sleep, you get a mild negative mood effect until you are exhausted and the negative mood effect is more severe.

Any number of complaints can be made against a game this large in scale. So many people play this game, there is bound to be a group of people disappointed with every change or lack of change implemented in Sims 3. One that I initially found disappointing was the implementation of the “Active Household.” In The Sims 3, only one household can be active at a time. You cannot go to “Neighborhood” view and select another household to play; instead, you need to give up control of your current household to the AI. Although initially an unwelcome change, after playing for some time, it made more and more sense. The town really is a lot more fun with all the other families changing and aging along with your character. Additionally, this implementation finally allows for save game files that are easy to backup, restore, and transport form computer to computer.

The only really negative aspects of The Sims 3 that continue to dissatisfy me, are the underwhelming advances made to the body and sim customization. Sure, sims can now be created on a more linear scale from skinny to fat, but there are still far to few options. What about sims of different height? Sims with long legs and short torsos, sims with exceptionally long necks, sims with really big hands or feet, they are all impossible. The core gameplay is not affected by this aspect of the game, but it sure is discouraging that the designers are baby stepping their way up the customization ladder. After the amazing customization available in Spore, it seemed maybe The Sims was headed that direction, unfortunately it falls short.

The game launcher is even more useful than the one implemented in the later The Sims 2 expansions; it provides a great platform for game updates, custom content downloads, and uploading content to share with the community. It is nice the the launcher is separated from the main game so that it is easy to play the game ignoring all the community features if you care to. Unfortunately, the custom content store remains a woefully overpriced option. Thankfully, the modding community is already hard at work creating free updates for those of us unwilling to succumb to a micro-transaction based DLC model for a full priced game with not exactly bargain-priced expansions.

The game is technically very sound. Rather than try and up the graphics ante as with the Sims 2, The Sims 3 really focused on optimizing the experience. That is not to say that the graphics are not improved, because they are. The game as a whole feels much smoother than the Sims 2 ever did, even on modest hardware. Sure you need good hardware to run with all the eye candy turned up, but the basic system requirements are smartly very middle-of-the-road. The game runs quite well on the latest integrated graphics. I was even able to install and run the game on a laptop with a Pentium M 1.73 GHz and GMA900 graphics. Sure, it stuttered a little when a lot of sims were in the same room, and didn’t speed up all that well when playing on high speed, but it was playable. On a Netbook or a laptop without an optical drive, the digital distribution version is the way to go. While these low requirements may anger the graphics snobs of gaming, the low barrier to entry will help the game sell all that many more copies.

The relaxed hardware requirements are not the only thing that makes this game easy to pick up and play. For the first family you create, a tutorial presents itself in the form of pop-up dialogs as you play. This tutorial introduces you to the basic gameplay as well as new Sims 3 features. Beyond this tutorial, which is skippable, additional pop-ups prompt you to “learn more” about new things as you discover them.

Overall, The Sims 3 is a very enjoyable game. It is easy to learn, and also easy to transition to from the previous iterations. The Sims 3 is certainly a worthwhile sequel. For those who have played the series regularly, you most likely already know if you are going to buy it. However, for those of you who haven’t played The Sims in a while, or somehow have never played it at all and think you might have an interest, this one is worth checking out. The game play involves much less micro-management, and much more opportunity for interesting and amusing interactions among characters. The building and designing portions of the game are also better than ever. The Sims 3 gets a strong recommendation for being an enthralling game which succeeds at extending and expanding the Sims universe.