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The Sims 3

Starting Out

You start by selecting your town and then either creating a new sim or by taking over one of the existing households already living in the town. The Sim Creator has received a complete overhaul and almost any aspect of a Sim can be adjusted with sliders. Sim body shape can also change over time - you can start with a flat slob and then go nuts with exercise and you will lose weight. You can also stop dreaming, inject some realism to the game and eat pizza while watching TV and... well, you get the idea.

When starting a new game you can be single and then either stay that way or "get a life" and experience all the messy interpersonal relationships and drama that come with it. Alternatively you can start with a whole family and skip all the time-consuming bits required for scoring that personal cooking and cleaning technician ("Wife"). Staying single is definitely "hard mode" but once you have a couple of kids running around in the house, the drawbacks of that also become apparent. Some may claim this to be realistic.

Creating a custom Sim

All set - a politician, wishing to be the Leader of the Free World.

Each individual Sim starts out with a number of traits and a lifetime wish. Traits define the personality and skills of a Sim and include such things like "Athletic", "Evil", "Lucky", "Natural Cook" and "Workaholic" and you start with up to five of them. Kids start out with less traits and no wish, earning them as they grow older. Depending how well you raise your kids, you may get to pick and choose the additional traits. Fail at it, and your offspring will get them assigned by random - and those random traits have a tendency to be negative ones.

Lifetime Wish is a goal you can pick from a number of possible choices based on your traits. It acts as a strong hint for potential careers that suit your traits and acts as a goal to work towards during the life of the Sim. Generally the Lifetime Wish asks you to reach the maximum level in a career. Evil, Ambitious and Charismatic Schmoozer is probably a good fit to become a politician while a Kleptomaniac Daredevil might want to look towards a career as a criminal.

Nothing exactly forces you to pick your career based on your traits - you can freely choose what you want, but some traits do make it easier to advance up the career ladder quite a lot. It is possible to alter your traits later on by spending reward points to buy "Midlife Crisis" reward to re-set your traits and same is true for changing the lifetime wish.

A Sim Needs a House

A new Sim household starts out with a very limited budget that is enough for a low end house. Fastest way is start out is to pick a pre-built house, with or without pre-set furniture. Alternatively you can buy an empty lot and build the whole house from scratch with your starting funds. Second option gives you exactly what you want but it also means that you'll probably spend time fiddling with your house in build mode for an hour or two before your Sim(s) even moves in.

If you don't want to see your Sim suffer, each house needs a set of basics - a toilet, a shower or a bath, a bed and a kitchen of sorts with a fridge. Beyond that, only your imagination and the available items limit your choices. The available material and pattern choices for floors, wallpapers and the garden are numerous but the actual item selection for many types of furniture is so limited that it is shocking. There is enough choice to get by for a while, but soon enough you'll begin to see the pattern - there is plenty of room for add-on packs and individual furniture sold via microtransactions.

One option is to use the built-in tools to adjust colors and you can also find custom-colored furniture for free at The Sims 3 Exchange, but these customizations are limited to recolorations of existing objects. While The Sims has always been a very moddable game, there are no official way to create custom items by designing or altering meshes, or by changing item functionality.

Career Building

One of the first things you'll have to sort out early on is to figure a way to make more money. Simoleons run out quickly if you have no income stream as bills pile up regularily time based on the overall total value of your house. The easiest way is pick a newspaper or visit a related building to get a full-time job. You can pick one out of ten available careers - Criminal, Law Enforcement, Military, Culinary, Journalism, Medical, Music, Politics, Science, Sport or Business. The Sims 3 concentrates very much on obvious dream careers and in that aspect it could be called "The American Dream - The Videogame" - obviously Doctors and CEOs are the ones that rake in the big bucks.

Each career has a branching tree of potential promotions. While at work, you slowly earn the possibility for promotion and/or raise depending on your skills and your mood. Wake up tired after a long night of playing games on your PC, skip a breakfast, head out without a shower and your mood will drag down your productivity at work. Who would've thought that such things might affect work performance. I wonder if The Sims 3 is onto something here...

Higher levels of each career tend to result with a shorter work week, shorter hours and better pay per hour - just like in real life. For example, at high levels of Military Career your Sim needs to work only a couple of days a week and at Level 10, Astronaut, only for one very long day per week. Different careers also unlock special abilities and benefits. Law Enforcement gets his own squad car and Rock Stars have no set work hours - they can hold a concert whenever they feel like it (or need the money).

Alternatively you can try making money from home - there are numerous hobbies that can bring in the cash and if you work on your skills, the sums can be quite substantial. Writers can live off royalties from their books, Painters can earn simoleons from selling their art, Computer Wizards can spend a night hacking for money and so on. There are hundreds of ways to play the game depending on the traits and the career you choose. While you work on your mad skills you can also make ends meet by taking up a part-time job like Grocery Store Clerk or Receptionist. Less work hours, less money but more time at the house.

Each skill also has a set of mini-achievements to strive for, to extend additional goals after you have "maxed out" your Sim. These goals can unlock additional abilities and recipes, adding even more depth to the available activities. You can't possibly master everything in one lifetime, giving The Sims 3 additional replayability as a game.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Online FunctionalityPage 5: Performance, VisualsPage 6: Summary, Scores

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