7/10
It's worth it for the tents alone. My little one-man pyramid of canvas was bought so as not to waste precious hours returning to the hotel whilst out on a long expedition, but it was upon realising it was in my Sim's inventory on my return to homely Riverview that I realised its true worth.
Why, I can sleep anywhere! Outside the bookshop! In the park! In my ex-girlfriend's garden! In the graveyard. Pfft. I don't need a house now I've got a tent. There are toilets at work, computers in the library, and I can always pull off a guerrilla shower whilst visiting a mate's house. Truly, this is the life.
Briefly, I entertained the idea in reality. It was only the image of writing this very review in a tent, at night, in the rain, with a screaming cat at my side that stopped me from embarking on an extraordinarily reckless evening. This only served to hammer home the great appeal of the Sims - it offers fulfilment of our most mundane wishes, with none of the repercussions. Security, freedom, comfort, friends who don't mind if you turn up at their door and demand to use their shower at 4am...
Those who decry the Sims as dreary and pointless don't appreciate the import of these oh-so-ordinary desires. No one really wants to be a mohawked Scottish commando or a fat cartoon plumber. Everyone wants to be able to sleep wherever they want, whenever they want.
Despite the delectable freedom offered by its tents, it's one of very few ways in which World Adventures reinforces what The Sims is best known for. To its credit, it doesn't repeat the formula of a Sims 1 or 2 expansion, but tries to break new ground for the flabby-but-fascinating people-management series. It's Tomb Raider with Sims. It's Diablo with toilet breaks. It's Pokemon with nudity. It's... well, it's not painstakingly orchestrating the daily lives of digital people, put it that way.
In practical terms, it's three large new towns for the game, alongside the two official ones. They're agreeably exotic destinations - distilled, compressed Greatest Hits of Egypt, China and France, containing miniaturised versions of their major sights. An extra option on the phone and PC menus whisks you off to one for a few in-game days, for an understandably but not unrealistically exorbitant in-game cost.
Once you're there, you can do the standard Sims thing - meet people, fulfil biological needs, amuse your Sim(s) with sights and activities, buy stuff. It's that pleasant mundanity again, only in dramatically more grandiose locales. One of my Sims spent three days in China watching couples play chess in the park. He seemed to enjoy it. I'm not convinced they felt the same.
While it's a game that can pull a lot of pleasure from simply watching your guys do stuff, the hands-off nature of so many of The Sims 3's more appealing activities meant there was an air of futility at times. Oh great, they get to have fun, but what about me? I'll just sit here and watch, shall I?
Yet more deflating was the amount of stuff that wasn't even shown, let alone interacted with - all you got was the outside of a building, a floating progress bar if you were lucky, and then your Sim emerging a couple of minutes later with a temporarily altered statistic or two.
World Adventures fixes that - it's a smart response to the problem of your Sims stealing too much of your fun, and to justified accusations that The Sims 3's open world failed to shake up the venerable formula as much as had been hoped. Whilst on holiday, your Sims can take on quests. Maybe it's getting two other Sims to fall in love, maybe it's picking up pieces of rare metal scattered across certain bits of the landscape or maybe, and most appealingly, it's raiding an underground tomb.
And these quests really are like a mini, knowingly silly Tomb Raider. You push blocks around, you open hidden doors with floor switches, you try not to walk through fire and electricity traps and you collect coins and relics. Oh, and you pitch that wonderful tent if it's getting late, as getting back to Base Camp can take an age.
The tomb runs require you to firmly hold the hand of your Sim, giving him to-the-letter directions - taking direct control in a way the game has never previously required. It's a little fiddly, as The Sims is naturally more geared towards broader gestures rather than such precision, but it's ever so charming - and it's genuinely doing something new with the game.
It's light puzzling and light role-playing, very carefully implemented in such a way that it won't confuse or terrify the Sims' less game-savvy audience. Perhaps it's even a gateway drug to more traditional games. As well as earning you money and items, tackling quests wins Visa Points - necessary to extend the length of your holidays, which are initially brutally short.
It's in the small ways that this melds with The Sims 3's marvellous ability to create ad-hoc vignettes that it really shines. My Sim had traipsed through a Chinese tomb, suffering a near-death experience with a firetrap halfway through. Upon finally emerging into fresh air, I duly ordered him to head over to the buyer of rare goods in order to spend all the ancient coins he'd collected.
What I forgot was that a) it was about 3am in-game at that point, b) I hadn't ever met the buyer of rare goods yet, and c) the firetrap mess meant my fat, bad-tempered Sim was now virtually naked and caked in ash. The second this frightening apparition turned up at a stranger's house in the dead of night, they fled - a screaming, arm-waving Chinese merchant running away from his own house in absolute terror. A beautiful moment, and excellent proof of how smart and complicated The Sims 3 can be.
As a statement of intent about how The Sims 3 is going to treat its expansion packs, it's bold and promising. This isn't pets or restaurants or H&M clothing packs: it's a clutch of completely new ideas and mechanics. Yeah, there's a bunch of new skills for your Sims to learn (photography and booze-making, most notably) and home furnishings to buy too, so World Adventures is hardly going to stumble and fall if the audience doesn't take to the quest-and-puzzle stuff after all. But it's enormous, both in terms of virtual landmass and things to do - which is what the game really needed.
The trouble is that it does feel at odds with what The Sims is. It's got no relation to suburban reality, or even to expensive holidays - it's off into Indiana Jones territory, in an entirely different game universe bolted onto the side of the familiar one.
Your Sim pops off to do all this fantastical stuff for a few in-game days, then he's pinged rudely back to normality and there's a disjointed sense of playing two separate games that have been stitched slightly unnaturally together. Though at least you get to take the tents and Showers In A Can home with you.
On the other hand, now EA has taken the step of making your Sims' activities more interactive, hopefully that'll be retroactively inserted into the main game/towns in a future expansion. As well as filling in a few of the parent game's holes, it'd make 'The Sims 3 plus World Adventures' experience a whole lot more seamless.
Without a doubt, EA isn't treating the expansion of The Sims 3 lightly - World Adventures might be a bit of a thematic stumble, but it makes for a significantly bigger and more varied game, far more so than any prior Sims 1 or 2 expansion has achieved. It's impossible not to recommend it to avid Sims players, but anti-Sims snobs will inevitably find it to be an annoying side-order of collectormania and repetitive puzzles.
If some of its interactivity mechanics can eventually be folded into the game's core open world, however, then we'll be well on the way to having the pacifistic Grand Theft Auto it's surely this series' destiny to ultimately become.
UK version
2009-06-16 13:28:07 - roberto wrote:
Like all sims games its great unless you play it for too long in one go then never want to play it again. I like how this sims game has advanced from the others so now its more realistic in how you interact with everything. And you can change everything to suit you but it feels like theres less to choose from somehow. It's like yeh you can change everything you want but theres not as many items which was disapointing but i have to say its the best sims game yet, just wonder if they'll add any expansion packs.