A broken disaster that somehow manages to be boring at best.
Firstly, the game performance and technological issues. I'm talking about this first because it's simply the most prominent. You know why? The game is broken. It's just barely playable. There are so many bugs and glitches! People don't come over when you invite them, loading times are exceptionally long, sims looks awful and the environments look like something out of The Sims 1, refrigerators and some other objects often just stop working and become unselectable, Sims will run in circles and glitch out frequently, the Fire Code doesn't go down when you delete items, things disappear, people get stuck, it freezes all the time, there are a variety of problems with game mechanics, and the music/soundtrack is mediocre and annoying at best. Not to mention the fact that your Wii starts to make noises as though Satan himself is inside of it, causing a ruckus, as soon as you put the disc in. Something just makes me feel like every second I spend playing this game breaks my Wii just a little more. There's really nothing good to say in this section except, hey, it works.
As for the controls, they're pretty bog standard. You use the Nunchuk to control your Sims' exact movements, though it is spotty and often spazzes out on you and there is no classic, point and click mode like console TS2 games featured, forcing you to play in a style that may be uncomfortable.
Now for the gameplay. I wish I could give the game more praise in this section, but I really can't. As I started the game, I thought it would be great. A smooth menu screen, and a pretty great CAS (Create a Sim) tool that allows you to customize your Sims to your heart's content and make a family of whatever make-up you can think of. The music is the worst in this menu, but for a console game the customization is nearly top-notch. You get this great idea that the rest of the game will be like this... and then it all goes downhill from there.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a variety of screwy game mechanics. One of them is the townspeople's peculiar habit of dying everywhere. There will come a point where your town is literally covered in tombstones. Another is the fact that when Sims have babies the children seemingly come out as 10 year olds for whatever reason, completely skipping the baby and toddler ages. Sims die way too easily, and when they catch on fire, there's nothing you can do about it except sit there for about 5 minutes and watch them burn until they die. Sims have to get jobs but considering these jobs and other mundane tasks take up too much time, you'll find that your Sims frequently die when on the way to a job. You can have up to three saved games, which is pretty great, though you can only have one of your own families in each town. The townspeople may be interesting, but they're not that interesting. You can no longer build houses from scratch, you have to start with extremely laggy and overpriced template houses that you can only customize the furniture and wallpaper/flooring of. One of the most irritating things is that one Sim family can only live for 50 days. You'll have to start from a previous save point if you want to continue playing, even then it'll just continually end. And most of the time, when the life ranking screen comes up, the game just freezes and crashes anyway.
Though the game's advertisements make it sound like a successful port of everything you need on the PC, it's still presented as very stripped, with only the bare basics of things to do. Countless elements have been removed, mostly to do with lifestyles, like Sims can no longer be ghosts, and a variety of other things. The game still presents a nice, open-ended system like a Sims game should, but it's hindered by many things and seems to be just a bit too stripped.
I won't say that the game doesn't come with new content. Released with all The Sims 3 console ports, Karma powers play a part in making your Sims' lives more interesting, which picks up on a bit of the slack, but they're still hard to get into. When your Sims go to work, you can now control exactly what activities they're doing, how long they stay in work, and all of these affect your performance. The same goes for school. It's a feature that takes a lot of the boredom out of these periods of time if you only have one Sim and it's nice, refreshing, and usually works well. The game is enjoyable if you're a true Sims fan and can manage to get creative with what you can do in this nice little beach town, as it gives you all you should need for an authentic Sims experience, though it feels limited, spotty, and stripped a lot of the time as well.
A second optional aspect of gameplay is the new card game mode. It has an official name, but I just call it card game mode, because that's really all it is. It's a multiplayer minigame where you and another person or two (though who would want to pull this out at a party I don't know) go through a series of confusing screens and point systems, making decisions based on text scenarios. Whoever has the overall better life is the winner. And the scenarios aren't even Sims-related or possible in the actual sandbox game. It really has nothing to do with The Sims, is confusing, and I guess could be fun for a little bit, but it gets boring extremely fast and presents absolutely no real Sims gameplay.
Overall, the game may be stripped, broken, frustratingly laid out, and devoid of much excitement, but if you're willing to work your way past these hinderances, it'll still provide you with a couple hours of Simming fun and spark up a bit of creativity. As always, if you can, the PC/Mac versions are always recommendable over this game, and if that's not possible, go for the PS3 or XBox versions... I would hate to see anyone make snap judgments about the The Sims series based on this game.