Carl's The Sims 3 Review
Learn about new features and buy the game
The Sims 3 is a fantastic game, with something for most gamers, and non-gamers alike. If you're an action freak, you probably won't enjoy the title, but most players who don't mind a casual experience will enjoy the game. Players who've played previous titles will find this incarnation the most fully featured yet. Most everything about the Sims experience has been improved.
Read my review, and if you like what you hear, return here when you're ready to buy the Sims 3. All orders are handled by Amazon. After your purchase, come back to use my guide, which features dozens of sections and covers most everything in the first incarnation of The Sims 3!:
What is The Sims?
At heart, the Sims 3 is a life simulation game. There is a lot of strategic depth to explore, but it's also highly accessible. You don't have to be a 'gamer' to enjoy the Sims, you just need to be able to use a mouse. Everyone from kids to grandmothers have enjoyed the Sims in the past, making it the best selling PC game in history.
As a player, you'll get to choose how your Sims live their lives. You're tasked with making them happy, and seeing them through adulthood and into their senior years. Along the way, you may pursue any number of goals, participating in player-made challenges, or Simply attempting to complete their lifetime wish.
Create-a-Sim
Although you can choose to play one of the existing households in the game, or select a pre-built Sim, the typical Simming experience will start with a player entering Create-a-Sim mode (CAS). In CAS, you begin by designing how your Sim will look. The amount of tweaking you can do here is incredible, and it's not hard to create a Sim representation of yourself, a famous person, or just customize their facial features, build and body weight until you're satisfied with their appearance. You choose how they'll dress in categories ranging from everyday wear, to what they'd wear to the gym. The game delivers awesome customization features, giving you the ability to choose the color you'd want for their clothes, or select from an assortment of patterns. You can spend a lot of time tweaking here.
Lifetime Wishes and Traits
From within CAS, you will select 5 traits for your Sim. These traits will affect their behavior, and what they're going to be especially good at in life. There are a total of 60 traits in Regular Sims 3 to choose from. Some are great for boosting your Sim's performance in jobs (such as workaholic), how they'll do at a particular skill (green thumb), or even how they'll behave socially (friendly). These five traits come together and allow you to select a lifetime wish for your Sim.
A lifetime wish is the ultimate goal of a Sim's life. This will strongly influence what direction you'll take when playing the game. If you decide to make a Sim who wants to be Surrounded by Family, you might make a spouse for them in the same household, and get to work building a life and making children with that Sim. Your Sim might want to accumulate a number of friends, or just get to the top of a particular career track in the game. There are over 30 wishes to pursue, giving you a great selection of goals to pursue.
Share with Others
Once your Sim is completed, you can save them and share the Sim with others via The Sims 3's game launcher. You can manage your creations through the interface Electronic Arts has created at the Sims 3's community website. Your uploads will appear on the exchange. From there, you can also search for creations by other players. Some look very professional and fit right in with the game. Search by keywords or category. The exchange has a crazy number of objects to browse at this point. For once, you'll definitely want to make an account so you can get in on the fun.
House Building
After making your Sim, you'll enter the neighborhood and select to either have them live in a pre-built home or design one of their own. There are a number of homes that can be purchased on a budget from the get-go, but you'll probably want to try your hand at making a house at some point. Veteran Simmers who loved designing homes in the past will find that the Sims 3 has made it the easiest and most detailed it's ever been.
Whipping together four walls has never been easier. From there, you'll have tons of options for design. There are numerous patterns and colors to choose from for your walls and carpet, and a nice selection of windows. Extra design elements like ponds, fireplaces and foliage add that extra touch. You're even able to select what color you'd like your Sim's grass to be. You could just use your imagination, or use a photograph of a house on television or your own home to help guide you in designing your Sim's abode.
Buy Mode
There's a ton of shopping to do in the Sims 3, once you've built your Sim a house. The game ships with plenty of objects to keep your Sims busy, and we all know the expansions will push this into a new strata. Along with the exchange, we'll have tons of items for our Sims to enjoy and to decorate their homes. There are numerous sorting options, to help you find the type of item you need. My favorite is sort by room. A picture of the room is displayed, and you'll get to choose what type of furnishing you're looking for by clicking on, say, a television in the living room, or a computer in the study. Objects can now be placed at angles, giving you more options for how you lay out your Sim's home.
As with Sims you create, you can share homes (your lot) on the exchange, and browse a great selection to import into your game.
The Neighborhood
Once you move your Sim into their home, you'll be able to begin experiencing the new approach to the neighborhood in the Sims 3. Veterans who hated the loading screens every time they wanted to go on a date, or shop at one of the stores in town will be happy to hear that the world is now open for exploration. You can choose any location for your Sim to go to, and they'll zip off in either a cab or a car you've bought for them. Cars even have varying degrees of speed, so buying that slick sports car will get you to the supermarket in no time. There are no speed limits in Sunset Valley.
While some buildings are explorable, others are "rabbit holes" where Sims will disappear while inside. For example, the supermarket can't be viewed internally, but Sims will step inside and a menu will pop up, allowing them to browse items to buy, or even sell fish and produce they've come up with through using their skills. In some cases, this works well because it would be annoying to actually have to walk your Sim around looking for items. I suppose an expansion in the future may allow us to see into these locations, and even watch our Sims while at work, but then again it may require way more processing power and memory requirements than the developers would have liked to make the game more accessible from a system requirements standpoint.
Still, this open world is nice. Heading to the park for a picnic or to play the guitar can be fun, and heading all over the countryside looking for collectibles is a nice feature. You can visit a friend's house and view it from the inside just like it was your own. I've even had Sims practically move in with another Sim who had a mansion and mooch practically all day.
Gameplay Features
There are tons of ways to play the Sims 3, given the amount of gameplay features the game offers. You can choose to pursue their lifetime wish, and do what you think would be appropriate to help them get to that goal. You could also take on a player-made challenge to give your game a bit more direction. I see the open-ended gameplay of the Sims 3 as a feature, more than an annoyance. There's so much to do, and watching the Sims grow up through aging and as more skilled people is a satisfying experience.
Careers
There are a total of 11 career tracks in the regular version of The Sims 3, some of which branch off into two career paths. Your Sim will leave for work on scheduled days once you make them take a job at one of the businesses in town. Their job performance will be determiend by a number of factors, based on the current job position. Your Sim might need to work on their gardening skill to be a better scientist, or work on charisma to excel as a politician. Work hard, and Sims will eventually be promoted, giving them an hourly raise, and sometimes even career rewards, such as the law enforcement career's ability to raid the criminal warehouse in town at high levels.
Skills
There are ten skills that can be learned in the Sims 3, ranging from Fishing to Charisma to Painting. All these skills are tracked in the skill journal, and offer bonuses for completing certain tasks. Athletes may be rewarded with a longer life span for running a set distance, or chefs might prepare better meals from learning to prepare all the dishes in the game. There's a lot to do, and overall skills seem to raise a little slower than in previous games, giving you a little more time to savor the nuances in between skill levels.
All these skill options means plenty of ways to raise self employment income in the game. You're able to sell paintings, produce from your Sim's garden, and even have them become a writer who receives a weekly royalty check. Some Sims can be successful without ever having applied to a typical career this way. In fact, skills offer the greatest opportunity for money-making in the game.
The Life Cycle
Sims grow older over time. You can watch your Sim's kids age, and allow your main Sim to grow old as well. You can control up to 8 Sims in a single household, giving you plenty of diversity in the ages of Sims present in any household at one time. Children will want to play with toys, and need to go to school, and toddlers need to learn how to walk, talk and potty. Teens will be able to go to high school and start seriously pursuing their talents. They can even get part time jobs to help the family pay the bills and buy new objects. As a Sim grows into the elder stage, death will eventually be expected, without disabling aging or eating Ambrosia, a recipe which can bring Sims back from the dead or halt the aging process.
Socializing
The Sims 3 shows a lot of depth with its socializing system. Based on personality, charisma skill levels, and character traits, Sims will be able to perform a huge array of social interactions. Your Sim will develop relationships over time, and may have friends, enemies and even fall in love to eventually get married and WooHoo to make a baby. The interface for socializing is simple and intuitive, and you'll generally find the type of action you're looking for based one one of the available categories. There's now a conversation meter, showing what the other Sim thinks of your Sim's interactions. Is the conversation getting romantic? Try a kiss after softening them up a bit and your Sim will be much less likely to be rejected.
Appearance and Sound
While the Sims 3 doesn't look anything like a modern first person shooter in terms of graphical quality, it's a huge leap forward when compared with the Sims 2, that is, if your system can play with all the graphical features turned on. The developers were kind and offer a very wide range of graphical qualities for people with older computers. Water effects look great, and the world looks and feels alive with blowing trees, cars going by and a well-done day and night cycle. Fishing by the beach at night time offered a lot of eye candy. There's a lot of detail here, with players even spotting airplanes in the sky.
The Sims themselves are beautifully animated, and I highly suggest you tweak your graphical settings a little lower if they're not. Their facial expressions and body language can be priceless sometimes, and jerky animation just won't do. Everyone looks a little more cartoony this time around, but that's just fine. It helps a lot for the comedic aspects of the game. There's a lot of humor here for people who get a kick out of just watching, from time to time.
Simlish is back yet again, and the game's soundtrack is great. Players who purchase a radio can hear several really well done pop songs, written entirely in Simlish. Interface sounds deliver satisfying clicks to let you know the game is responding, and the background music in the build and buy modes is cheerful and bright.
Summing it Up
I've enjoyed my time with the Sims 3 for several months, so I have to give it very high marks for replayability. Only now, on the eve of the first expansion pack and after having played for over 5 months do I have a real hunger for more content. I feel like I've done most of what 'vanilla' Sims 3 with no expansions has to offer. There are still dozens of challenges to pursue, but I'm hungry for World Adventures.
The experience has been great, and I have to recommend it highly to gamers and non-gamers alike. If your PC can run it, and you'd like to give playing games a whirl, this is the right title for you. If you're a gamer and you like games with a lot of depth, and open-ended gameplay, you'll probably enjoy the Sims 3. With "rabbit holes" being my only major gripe, and perhaps wishing for a little higher quality graphics, I have to give it a big two thumbs up. But then, you wouldn't expect me to thrash the Sims 3 in my review if I made a website dedicated to it, right? I'll certainly be harder on expansion packs when they're released. They've just got to be worth spending money on!
