The Sims 3 review

We review The Sims 3, the lifestyle sim that somehow manages to squeeze in all the main features of its PC big brother

Published on Sep 4, 2009

Some non-gaming folk may dismiss lifestyle sims as being for those looking to fill the void left by the fact that they themselves don’t have a life. However, we think they’re simply fun. And we have lives. We really do.

The Sims 3 is the latest mobile version of the franchise that has seen offshoots concerned with pets and desert islands, when not simply trusting you with the life of an everyday suburbanite. The Sims 3 is very much focused on the latter though.

You start of with a house with some basic amenities, but little else. You need to find a job, friends, a relationship and, most important of all, a shower repair kit. Ok, so that’s perhaps not the most important part of the game, but the mini-games involved in repairing your fridge, TV and shower represent the game’s approach to the franchise.

It’s always trying to keep you busy. Whether you’re trying desperately to get your sim washed and presentable before work or desperately trying to get yourself out of the perilous ‘friend zone’ with your neighbour Maggie, there’ll always be something to do.

Your overall game objectives are based on what sort of sim you create. You get to choose their personality traits in the initial character generation process, so if you brew up a psychopath, you’ll have to get on the bad side of everyone in town. If you create a more adjusted sim, you’ll just have to get a high-flying job and furnish your house more luxuriously than anyone else in your neighbourhood.

On second thought, that’s no equation for a well-adjusted person.

To tie these over-arcing objectives together, there’s a constant stream of ‘wishes’ that pop into your sim’s head. These could be anything from keeping clean for several days on the trot, a true achievement in anyone’s book, to planting carrots in your garden.

The way the game keeps you focused on tasks throughout while still keeping it all related to your very own custom-made sim is what makes The Sims 3 so engaging. It manages to cut out all the flab from the PC Sims experience without leaving out any of the key bits. Sure, you can’t customise your house to the same extent, but you can still buy all sorts of expensive furniture and utilities to get to look you’re after.

We did find that The Sims 3 is initially a bit confusing. In spite of a simple interface where you just have control a cursor using the keypad, selecting objects to use or move your character over to them, there’s still a greater learning curve than in the majority of mobile games. However, considering quite how sprawling the game’s content is compared with your average mobile game, we’re more than happy with the compromise.