In previous games, the presence of various neighborhoods led to a disjointed experience, so you rarely felt like you were in a living world. It all sounds terribly mundane, but balancing the needs of your sims and tending to your digital playmates can keep you happily glued to your monitor for hours at a time.įor experienced Sims players, the laundry list of new features in The Sims 3 is extensive, but the one overhaul that has the biggest impact on the game is how seamlessly you can now move around your virtual town. In other words, they act a whole lot like real people, except that they yammer in a delightful gibberish called simlish and communicate via speech bubbles that appear over their heads. They make friends and enemies, they go swimming, and they clog up the toilet. Sims go to work to earn simoleans (money, of course) so they can buy better things for their homes and redecorate-or just buy a brand-new home.

You can manage their personal development by sending them to the gym to work out, or by telling them to fix a broken television, or by having them play chess, or by sending them to the park to play the guitar. Your sims can have babies who will cry in the middle of the night, needing their diapers changed.

It's real life boiled down to simple mechanics, but within these mechanics lies an entire universe of possibilities. Sims have needs they need to empty their bladders, to eat, to sleep, to bathe, to have fun, to socialize. In it, you take control of a character called a sim, or an entire household of them. If you're new to the series, here's a quick primer. By blending together the old and the new, developer Maxis has created the best, most charming game yet in the series.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's Most importantly, the free-to-explore town makes you feel like part of an entire virtual society-a feature approximated but never fully realized in the previous games. Instead, returning elements have been energized and extended by a number of terrific improvements, such as expanded customization tools, additional tools for interaction with other sims (and other players), and more tangible goals and rewards. But this doesn't make The Sims 3 a simple rehash of what's come before. For anyone who's played The Sims or its first sequel, this familiarity will let them ease into it, feeling like a welcomed guest rather than an outsider. But in this case, that's a very good thing. Well, it most certainly is worth it, and yes, in some ways it is more of the same. The first thing you may be asking, then, is whether The Sims 3 is worth playing, or if it's just more of the same. It's been difficult to escape the popular franchise's web, what with two full games and a seemingly endless stream of expansions. If you're reading this, there's a very good chance that you've heard about The Sims.

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