Review: The Sims 3

The Sims has undoubtedly become one of the most popular franchises to date. With at least five expansion packs for each PC title as well as plenty of console and handheld versions, The Sims is an incredible moneymaker for EA Games. So it’s no surprise that a third The Sims title has been developed. For The Sims veteran, however, is this game worth a purchase? EA boasts many new additions and improvements to the third installment of the series, but it’s a question of whether or not EA can still deliver a substantial package that isn’t a mere rehash of The Sims 2.

The core gameplay is the same as the previous titles: you run a household of Sims and manage their lives. Just like humans, these Sims have needs like hunger and fun that need to be taken care of, wishes that must be fulfilled, and jobs to earn money for their bills, food, and furniture. They make friends, they make enemies, and they fall in love and get married. Sims can increase their ability in cooking or creativity, and they can work out to maintain a proper physique to attract members of the opposite gender. Of course as the player, you make the final decisions on how their lives play out. If you want them to reach the highest position in their career, you can do that. There’s also the possibility of forcing them to live like bums on the streets or manipulate them into falling in love with every Sim they meet. The world is your playground in The Sims 3, limited only by your imagination and well… the funds of your household.

Some would argue that The Sims and The Sims 2 suffered from the stagnant world outside of the controlled household. When you played a household in the previous games, your Sims grew and aged but the rest of the neighborhood did not. It was possible that three generations of Sims could have fallen in love with the same teenage Heather. The Sims 3 changes all of that with story progression, which basically allows the town to age and evolve with the household you control. Now that teenage Heather can grow up and become old (and eventually die) instead being the high school sweetheart for three generations of men in your family.

While The Sims‘ expansion packs and The Sims 2 (and its expansion packs) allowed you to take members of your household to different locations such as businesses and parks, a frustrating loading sequence interrupted their commutes to and from those locations. This could potentially take up to a few minutes, depending on the hardware of your PC. There were also weird problems with time; if your Sim left for home again at 12AM, the time would revert back to when your Sim had left home, which could have been days earlier. EA has decided to fix this issue by integrating your house with the rest of the world so that players and Sims can seamlessly travel to and from different locations without loading screens and time discrepancies. Now you can send a Sim to work and have him immediately head down to the grocery store instead of returning home. Maybe he’ll even talk to a few Sims and attend a painting class before he arrives to the household. While controlling him, you can simultaneously tell his wife at home to WooHoo with the repairman that came by to fix your computer. The open-world environment grants many more opportunities to you and provides a much smoother and pleasing experience than its predecessors.

Starting with the very first The Sims title, you had the option of assigning a different number of points to five different personality meters to determine your Sims’ neatness, outgoingness, and so on. The Sims 3 replaces that limited system with a trait system. For each Sim, you assign up to five personality traits to make your Sim a unique individual. These traits, such as “hopeless romantic” and “neurotic” and “lucky,” will affect your Sims’ behaviors and wishes and needs. A “couch potato’s” fun meter will increase quicker than the average Sim, and an “evil” Sim may have the lifetime wish of becoming “The Emperor of Evil.” It’s a much more dynamic and interesting system that is a welcome change to the franchise.

Issues with the constant monitoring of needs have been rectified with the overhaul of the mood/need system. While The Sims 2 introduced aspirations and moods and attempted to merge them with your Sims’ other factors, The Sims 3 does a great job of minimizing the role of the needs and placing mood as the most important factor. Fulfillment of wishes, interactions with other Sims, and the status of your needs will all affect your mood, which in turn affects your job performance and ability to do certain activities. Fulfillment of your wishes will add lifetime happiness points to your Sim, which can be used to purchase various personality enhancements and objects such the ability to need to sleep less or a teleportation machine. It’s obvious that The Sims 3 attempts to be more rewarding to players, and it does a decent job of it by frequently giving these lifetime happiness points.

Even with all these new additions and improvements, the game actually feels rather lacking and is filled with many problems. The option to freely travel about the town makes for streamlined gameplay, but the level of interaction at those locations is more or less the same as in The Sims 2. Story progression requires some serious bug fixing. You may choose to play another household, but suddenly you may find that the AI has caused your original family to move elsewhere, meaning your first household is lost forever. Coupled with the AI pathfinding issues, The Sims 3 doesn’t feel like a living, breathing world when the NPCs won’t make the big decisions such as proposing to your Sims or even inviting your Sims to a party. Being able to change the colors of any object and clothing and hair is nice, but the game has shipped with considerably less amount of content compared to its immediate predecessor, possibly to force players to purchase downloadable content through the new store. The Sims 3 Launcher, which acts a front for the store, downloads, and game updates, would be more useful if it was actually built into the game itself. Most of all, the game seems rather empty when you consider the thousands of possibilities and choices that the expansion packs of The Sims 2 introduced, such as seasons and pets and college.

I’ll be blunt here: The Sims 2 with its expansion packs is far more enjoyable than The Sims 3. With many Sims fans focusing on object and clothing creating, house building and decorating, and storymaking, it’s a wonder how much of the fanbase will truly appreciate the revamped trait system and the story progression mode. The open world environment is the primary new feature that all players will love, but it’s not quite enough to make up for the lack of content, very similar graphics, and numerous bugs that need fixing. It still maintains the charm of its predecessors, and some of the situations and events that arise are actually amusing. At the end of the day though, it’s still very much The Sims. One thing’s for sure: if you weren’t a fan of the other The Sims games, you won’t be a fan of The Sims 3.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - The new open world environment is impressive. - New video recording tools will allow for sick machinima. - Overhauled trait system creates more realistic characters.	Doin’ It RONG: - There’s not enough content in the game. - Graphics received very little change from its predecessor. - There are too many bugs that need fixing.
FINAL SCORE: 6 / 10