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Posted by admin on Feb 18, 2011
The Sims 3 Review

The Sims 3 Review

Sims 3, much like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is another attempt by EA to make a quality version of a large scale franchise and put it onto a mobile device instead of making a quick garbage port to make a few bucks. And for this EA, I salute you.

Sims 3 takes the Sims experience and shrinks it onto your iPhone. The whole time I was playing Sims 3 on iPhone I felt like I was just playing a smaller Sims 3 on PC, smaller, not more watered down. Obviously some of the more robust features from the PC were removed but I never felt the iPhone version lacking.

Let’s start with the basics, unless you have been living under a rock for the last 15 years then you know what the Sims is. You take on the role of an avatar and run him/her through life. From customizing their looks to sending them on dates, their lives are yours to control. Speaking of control, controlling your sim is surprisingly easy, minus a few quirks. To move your sim you simply touch the place you want them to move or item you want them to interact with. Once your item is selected a menu pops out to the right and displays the different options you have for that item. You can zoom in and out by touching the sliding bar in the top right corner. To move the camera you place two fingers on the screen and rotate it the direction you want. Thankfully I didn’t have to do this very often because rotating the camera to where you want it is a real pain. Often I would accidently move the camera into a worse position then it was originally and not be able to place it properly. Aside from moving the actual camera I found ordering my sim around the house quite easy and painless. As well as relaxing at home your sim can also go into town to shop, work, fish, meet people, and visit neighbors in houses. To do this your sim must go to the town map.

Panning the screen in the town map was the most frustrating part of the entire game. When it came time to choose a job I made the mistake of choosing the job on the other side of town. Now understand, the town isn’t this huge metropolis, it is pretty small. My work was only three flick of the screen away. Time moves so quickly in Sims that you can become late for work quite quickly. If I have to spend 30 seconds attempting to pan to the far right corner then my sim ends up being late for work. I had this happen so many times that I ended up getting fired. Also when in the town map my sim is reduced to a small blue game piece and other Sims are turned into small yellow ones. After spending so long customizing my sim I kind of wanted to see him for more than half my game time.

Customizing my sim was quite in-depth for it being a mobile game. I had several outfits to choice from and many more available for purchase on the Sims Store, (obviously I went with the free stuff.) What I really enjoyed about customizing my character was the ability to pick a personality type and traits. I could be a jack of all trades, nice guy, sleaze, jerk, power seeker, or maniac. Once I picked a personality I could deck it out with traits like sly, couch potato, conversationalist, easily bored, things like that. Is it just me or is Sims 3 starting to sound more and more like a class based RPG? These traits I picked would have an effect on my sim in the game world as well as other sims because they have traits of their own as well.

Customizing my house was just as much fun as customizing my Sim, and just as easy. Turns out selecting items and designing my house was almost as easy with a touchpad as it is with a mouse. All I had to do was go into build mode then select what I wanted to change. The game never misunderstood what I was trying to select or anything. I was also impressed with the amount of items I could deck my sim’s house out with.

Sims 3 has a great new feature called goals. When you create you sim he/she is given five life goals that they wish to complete at some point. These don’t have to be crazy unreachable goals like you would expect life goals to be. When you play as a jerk one of his goals is to kick over every trash can in the game, or when you play as a maniac you want to sleep in five sim’s beds. As well as life goals your sim also gets just goals. These goals are randomly assigned and are a great ways to direct content. If you are just wasting time in your sim world suddenly your sim decides he/she wants to begin a romantic relationship. Now you have a goal to strive for.

Unfortunately I wasn’t as satisfied with the mini games as I was with the goals feature. Put bluntly, the mini games just weren’t fun for me. I felt like they were useless busy work to make us of the iPhones touch screen and accelerometer.

One little feature I liked was ability to add music from your iTunes into the game world. I know you can just start playing music before you start the app, but the ability to add it mid game is still a nice addition. Sadly you can’t change tracks in game so if you stumble across a song you hate yet still have in your iTunes, you’re stuck with it unless you want to exist the game to skip the track. The amount of DLC is also a nice feature, sure it costs a buck a pack but if you’re a sim addict then that’s money well spent.

Overall Sims 3 is a complete package. Hours and hours of awesome game play for just six dollars. Sure it has some control issues and boring mini games. It is still the Sims! It has all the addicting awesomeness that you have loved on the PC for years, but now you can play it on the way to work. Plus with two expansion packs out even once your done with the Sims, you’re not done with the Sims.

Author: Travis Wahlstedt.

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