Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Best in series"

(+) a ton of different appearance and personality traits to choose from / an entire thriving neighborhood of other Sims and businesses besides your house / playing around with your Sim family is still fun and addictive as ever / Karma powers add a unique twist to the gameplay

(-) loading screens break up the pace too often / some camera problems when viewing buildings from a second story / can only have one family in the neighborhood at a time

The Sims have always been known for giving us the pleasure of playing around with virtual people in the comfort of our home computer. It adds a layer of new emotions that feel unique to the common player, being interested in the realistic wants and desires of virtual people that we care for as if they were our own. Especially between other multiplayer first person shooters or arcade racing games, it's nice to be able to pay attention to simple little details like making sure your Sim gets a good night's rest when he'd rather play video games with his tiredness level on the rise. The Sims offer this dynamic style of play uniformly on the PC, but the team also tries the best they can to optimize the game for our modern consoles.

The first Sims to hit the PS2 and later the Gamecube and Xbox was a pleasant surprise. It had a decent amount of options for appearance, though you weren't really offered enough creation tools to make someone just how you wish them to look, and offered an impressive collection of building tools as well as sophisticated AI in the people. It was light on the features present in the PC release, but nonetheless became a solid attempt at bringing the franchise to consoles and became one of my favorite games. The successor was later brought to all three consoles, Sims 2, but lost a lot of the magic. The art style was an acquired taste, to preppy and cartoony, and the lackluster AI sucked a lot of fun out of the game. It became only recommendable to big fans of the series, but those people most likely have already had their fill of Sims 2 on the superior PC version.

While this installment on the PS3 and Xbox 360 isn't quite up to par with the PC outing, it's about the closest that we've seen as of yet. You'll instantly be surprised pleasantly at how many creation tools you have to customize the game just how you want it. You start out with the option to have a household of six, you can choose from people of any age from children, young adults, adults, to elders. You can mix and match every detail of their clothing, have a unique outfit for every day, work/school, exercise, and bed time. And you're given an astounding amount of options for shirts, pants, skirts, you can change the colors to your liking through an impressive amount of textures. You can even change physical features like the size and location of their eyes and the density of their nose. What's just as amazing is the amount of options you're given on their personality.

You have a massive 40+ personality traits on offer and you're allowed to choose five of them for each individual person. For example, an insane Sim will talk to himself in the broad daylight and rummage through the garbage can when no one is looking. A flirty Sim will be quick to perk with other Sims to try and get some. A mean spirited Sim will be an unlikable scrooge that will pick a fight at any opportunity. You can't choose two options that will contradict each other though, for example, you can't make a Sim both lucky and unlucky. Choose these options carefully as they fully influence the behavior of the Sim and just how you need to deal with them.

Based on some of the other criteria that you'll fill out during the lengthy process of creating each Sim, you'll choose a lifetime wish that'll be pretty much your goal for the game. It can be anything from being a professional cook to hustling a certain amount of cash. You'll be given hints and prompts on the game's interface to help you as you achieve these goals. But you could just as easily play around with the everyday lives of your household and have fun all the same. It's still charming and addictive watching these people tackle their everyday lives. It's all about making sure their needs are met in hunger, energy, social, bladder, hygiene, and fun. It's never quite as simple as sitting back and watching everything play out though. The interface gives you hints on your Sims desires, like say, quitting a job or befriending a certain Sim. You can choose to abort these operations or do them, and doing so will earn you points to use for the Karma powers, a welcome addition to the game's formula.

Karma powers can be used at will on any person you wish, even others that aren't in your household. Some of them are good, like removing all the bad moodlets of your Sim and making them all in a good mood, and randomly earning a great amount of money from unseen circumstances. Others are bad that can be used primarily for goofing off, like the infamous Epic Fail, which transforms any chosen Sim into a worthless loser that seems to fail at everything, or an earthquake can shake the area and break everything in the house. Your encouraged to use these powers properly because if you fail to do so then they'll start to activate on their own, which can cause some frustration if you're taking the game seriously. Luckily Karma Points are practically natural to acquire, so there's hardly ever a need to to save up if you wish to use them.

Also in bringing in a few innovations the third installment also shares some of the same strengths as its earlier brethren. While the AI hasn't improved much from the first Sims on consoles, it still offers some welcome predictability when you see humorous things like Sims giving an unlikable jerk in the house a blank stare or maybe scaring each other for no good reason. And while there are certainly better looking games on the PS3, the game retains the charm and color that the franchise is known for in a much slicker, cleaner design. The Sims themselves also sport a lot more detail when you zoom the camera up close. Meanwhile the language they speak is still as joyfully incomprehensible as ever, and people will love or hate that.

What you're getting in Sims 3 is hours of addictive entertainment in a genre that no other game has been able to quite match, but be warned that the first time you boot the game up, what you see from the get-go is what you've got. Other than the sheer amount of customization options and other features, there's very little that this game is hiding from you. You could always download user created content from the online severs, and tweak the settings to your liking. A word of advice. If you wish to have potentially unlimited replay value and want to stick to a given family as long as you want, I advise you to disable aging, which can be done in the main menu. Otherwise, Sims will actually age through their life cycle and eventually die.

There's no direct control in Sims 3 like there was in Sims 2. Usually controlling the game isn't all that difficult, but you'll probably need to take a few hours before everything starts to sink in. Not much could be done to bring the PC experience to modern consoles without being able to imitate a mouse, so it's all good. The controls work most of the time, but have some quirks. There's now the option to have two story homes, and when you're locked on a Sim that goes upstairs, they'll just bleed off into the unknown and you'll only be able to see the roof. It's frustrating to have to quickly select another Sim then re-select that Sim to see what they're doing, especially since you'll most likely have to do that again when they leave the room. Assigning a command like that to a single button would have been a lot more intuitive.

A lot has been done to make the world of the Sims seem more like a real thriving place. In addition to your single lot, there are also other homes with new Sims to meet, some parks, a cemetery, some restaurants, a gym, and more. These new places gives you more options on where you can take your family, and offer great new possibilities. It's unfortunate however that your travel between these places will be separated by short but frequent loading screens, which makes this big city seem more disjointed and overall limits the feature's appeal by a margin at least. It's also weird because the game has a mandatory 4 GB install which you would think would speed up the loading times. What's equally disappointing is you're only allowed to have one family have a residence in the town at a time. Earlier games you could easily have more than one family move in different rooms provided you have the memory card space on your PS2 or other system. No such luck here though.

Sims 3 is not for everyone of course. Those who are more interesting in high speed action and intensity already know better than to check this out. But for those looking for a game that'll make them think in ways they've never quite thought before, have new emotions and attachments with virtual people that'll surprise themselves at some point, then Sims 3 on the PS3 and Xbox 360 is the truest console port yet to the PC incarnations. It's got a ton more polish and customization features than ever before, and the same insanely addictive gameplay you'd come to expect. Of course there is still room for improvement, but for now, there's little evidence against saying that this is the Sims at its best.