It was always going to be troublesome making a sequel to a game with
eight expansion packs. The Sims 2 now lies as a bloated beast, full of
features incrementally added throughout the years in small £20
packages, but unbelievably its long overdue sequel The Sims 3 doesn't
feel the least bit castrated. The same winning formula has been carried
over, the fat trimmed, the remains toned, and what remains is something
that is as engrossing as ever.
The Sims 3, like its
predecessors, is not a hard game to understand. You take control of
'Sims' virtual people who must be guided through their life, their
jobs, their relationships, and as always, their trips to the bathroom.
Chances are though, with the massive success of the franchise, you
already knew that, just like you know that it's never as simple as
letting your Sim's life simply run its course, that the game is much
more intriguing than it would initially seem.
As always, the Create-a-Sim
mode is your first port of call when starting a game, and typically
it's more powerful than ever before. Not content with just giving you
control over every curve of the body, the editor now supports the
'Traits' system, whereby instead of choosing an amount of points to
coincide with your Sim's personality you instead pick five traits to
define them. These range from the useful (ambitious, brave, lucky) to
the destructive (evil, slob) to the seemingly aesthetic (excitable,
evil) but this emphasis on personality extremes rather than a sliding
scale makes for a game which is much more interesting to watch. With no
limitations on how many 'good' traits a player can choose the
temptation exists to game the system by choosing the most useful traits
for each Sim, but by doing so the player will miss out on some of the
game's most amusing features.
With such a robust character
creation system its a shame that you hardly ever get to see it. Unlike
in The Sims 2 where you took control of an entire neighbourhood, The
Sims 3 will see you take control of just one family, and any additional
households you make must be played in an entirely different game save.
This change allows for every person in your town to grow old at the
same rate as your Sims (so you'll never be faced with the awkward
situation of out-growing your teenage heartthrob) but also means that
you only ever experience the game from one viewpoint - there's no
hopping out to check out how that family across the street lives -
which leads to less variety in the game, unless of course you're
willing to have multiple save games.
As much as I'd like to say
The Sims 3 is a completely new game, that simply isn't the case.
Instead what I can say is that whilst every major mechanic from the
previous game exists here in some capacity, nearly all have received
some sort of tweaking. Career progression for example is no longer
completely binary. Whereas before you'd have to have 3 friends and a
logic skill of 5 to get a promotion, now you'll progress up the career
ladder for simply going to work for long enough. There still exists an
incentive to get these skill points, as doing so will get you promoted
much quicker, but this removes the much of the stress involved with
trying to reach the top of a career track, leaving you free to explore
the entire town without a load screen in sight.
This relaxing of
the requirements needed for promotion, as well as the decreased
emphasis on keeping your needs met, allows a much greater level of
involvement with the world created. There are exotic ingredients to
grow, challenges to complete, and a huge range of skills to learn, all
of which means your much more likely to spend your playtime cooking hot dogs for your neighbours in the town square rather than making sure your Sim doesn't take a wizz
in the shrubs. There's more stuff to do than there's ever been before,
and the game is careful to remind you that it's all possible.
The
game does have some rough edges. Sims will warp in and out of vehicles
rather than opening the door, which makes having that expensive car in
your driveway much less cool than it could otherwise be, and the
absence of any form of cutscene
for important points in a Sim's life diminishes what importance they
hold. Part of me however, wants to look at these shortcomings and
forgive them when there's so much content in the game. Less forgivable
is the small amount of customisation options for certain items such as
hairstyles, which starts to rub off badly on EA when the Sims 3 site is
full of additional items that can be downloaded for a charge, available
from day one.
If you've read this far, then I can at least
assume The Sims mildly interests you. The Sims 3 removes most of what
made the previous games boring to the non-fan, and adds enough new
stuff to make it worthwhile abandoning those old expansion packs. Of
course if you always hated the entire idea of the Sims then your choice
here should be a no-brainer, it is after all, still The Sims.
