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The Sims 3

Wishes and Rewards

During play your Sim will automatically think up wishes based on the traits, skills and career choices you make. Wishes act as a nice gameplay feature that pushes The Sims 3 more towards game than a toy and give you constantly something to work towards in case you can't decide what to do. You can ignore all wishes if you so choose and do anything you like, but completing the wishes of your Sim gives you points that can be spent on Lifetime Rewards that can be quite substantial. Rewards include unique abilities and while some rewards are somewhat silly, they can make the daily grind of your Sim a lot easier. Filling your Lifetime Wish acts as a long-term goal and awards you with a massive pile of reward points.

Both everyday activities and completion of wishes affect your mood via "moodlets" - effectively buffs or debuffs from just about anything you can do. Leave your Sim hungry or tired? Both give you a moodlet. Steal a candy from a kid (with the Evil trait) - a moodlet. Everything affects your mood, which in turn affects your work performance.

You will also receive opportunities based on your traits, career and skills. Career opportunities are related to your work and when completed, usually push you closer to a promotion. Skill opportunities depend on your skills and can give out all kinds of rewards including skill-related items and recipes. Special opportunities seem to happen completely randomly and each is a special event with unique rewards. The opportunities act as mini-quests to keep you busy based on your Sim's abilities.

Friendships and Relationships

Like in previous Sims games, friends are a big part of the gameplay. Each Sim has their own set of traits and it is up to you to find out who is a good match and who isn't, and in the case of romantic relationship you also should probably figure out as soon as possible if the potential mate is already taken - or end up with some epic drama. Friends also demand attention - if you never call or visit, a friend will soon forget you and you have to start all over again.

Visiting the house of a potential future wife for some socializing.

Bummer. Turns out she already has a kid. Time to activate the Evil trait special ability!

In case you started out single and work your way to a romantic relationship the option to go steady opens up, allowing you to move into one house and expand your household. Socializing is very well fleshed out and the only major complaint I have is that it takes completely impractical amounts of in-game time - like a lot of things in the game (more on that in a bit).

Nitpicking The Oddities

The Sims 3 is most of the time extremely detailed but there are some omissions. Some are just smart streamlining, some feel like odd design decisions. You can visit a store to buy groceries, but it is not mandatory - whenever you cook something that requires ingridients you do not have, you instantly buy them and they appear in your fridge. While you do need to make your bed, wash the dishes, clean up sinks and toilets and mop up any liquid spills, there is no need to clean the house in general. Clothes are entirely abstract - they do not exist as objects and you never need to worry about washing them - odd omission from a "dollhouse" game, but I guess modeling everything related to clothing would get very complex and time-consuming. Oddly while you can buy your own transportation - either a car or a bike - the carpool will still arrive every workday and you have to manually force your Sim to use his own car.

In general, in-game timescales try to be realistic. Normal work day tends to be a bit shorter than in reality. Instead of 9-to-5, many jobs demand shorter hours. 9-to-3.30 or 9-to-2 is common. This gives you a bit more free time, even if your commute of two to three blocks takes a good part of an hour of in-game time.

Time is always faster than real time even in the slowest mode and this causes the biggest problem I have with the game. Completely mundane tasks in house take up ages according to the clock. In a large house you can spend a game hour waking up, walking from bedroom at one end of the house all the way to bathroom at the other end and taking a shower, causing you almost miss your ride to work and leaving no time for breakfast unless you manually set your alarm earlier. Same is true for many other mundane tasks and this leaves very little time for recreational activities. Add in the fact that keeping your friends happy can eat many hours per day, toss in a hobby or two and there is no time to sleep properly. The issue becomes bigger as you move to a larger house. Granted, later levels of most careers allow you to work just a day or two per week, but it is still unrealistic and annoying that you spend so ridiculous amounts of time simply walking from place to place.

Default aging speed is also pretty quick. By the time you reach the top level of your career - even when working hard for it - you are old and approaching retirement. It is possible to disable aging completely but it takes quite a bit away from the game so the better option is to just add more days to the total length of the game. Story Progression, or the constant change to the lives of Sims around you can cause bizarre effects as other Sims make new friends, form new relationships and switch careers. Spend time sucking up to a boss only to find him to be unemployed and replaced by a whole new boss (that happens to have a lower rank in the career than you) is somewhat confusing.

Story Progression is something you can disable globally and in some cases it is almost mandatory. In theory, you can play multiple families living in multiple households at the same time by switching between the active household. Switching over sets your previous household into the hands of the simulation. If Story Progression is on, almost anything can happen to them while you spend time with the family in another house - they can even leave the town completely, so when switching back the house can be inhabited by a completely new family. Overall, the Story Progression option works fine as long as you are playing a single household - a lot of stuff will happen around you - but as soon as you try to juggle playing multiple households, it doesn't quite work as you'd expect it to work.

Annoyingly there is no autosave. The Sims 3 is mostly stable, but it can very rarely crash and when it does, it can easily take hours of gameplay down to drain. Granted, manual save takes so long that it may be that creating autosave just wasn't feasible due to the size of the save file - you would rapidly grow annoyed while waiting with "saving..." every few minutes.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Online FunctionalityPage 5: Performance, VisualsPage 6: Summary, Scores

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