Before I continue I’ll start by saying this is my initial reaction to playing the game. After playing the game a couple of days ago for the first time, here’s what I thought.
There’s still a lot that I haven’t been exposed to game play wise, but so far I have mixed feelings about the game. There’s certain things I like and certain things I feel needs work. As was mentioned before by many people, the animations need work. They are definitely not fluid at all. They kind of have a clunky feel to them. Especially the walk it kind has this hunch over pissed off vibe going on. I don’t know if has anything to do with the traits my sim has or what?
I love the fact that they can go out into town without a loading screen. But i felt some what cheated because when they drive or ride their bike into town, you can’t see them entering or exiting the cars or getting on and off the bike. It just feels too mechanical. Seriously EA, you couldn’t take out 30 mins of your day and recycle the getting into vehicle animation used in the Sims 2? At least give us that.
I love the camera controls. I think they are more versatile than before. The lighting is decent, I like the fact that you can colorize indoor lighting. That’s great for filming and story telling without the use of a lighting mod. I like that you can give your sim traits that’s pretty cool, and for the most part it’s fairly easy to keep your sims happy. I’m glad they continue to let us use the “testingcheats” especially now when there’s not many hacks right now.
All that greatness aside, it’s seems somewhat impossible to play multiple families. I noticed each family you start is like starting a new game if this were a console system. I thought story progression was a good idea however i didn’t count on the fail that tends to leak out at EA. I ended up not liking story progression, mostly because it almost feels like your main sim is stuck in the time warp, where he steps outside his best friend has toddler, when the day before he had no children at all. And where’s the kid’s mother? I noticed a lot of one parent homes popping up randomly as each day went on. But all is good let’s just disable the story progression function, oh wait! You can’t, because for some strange reason it won’t disable. Don’t get me wrong, story progression seems like a great premise for a story or film, the sim wakes up and the outside world has aged 10 years. But not so much if i want to just play the game.
The facial expressions are cool, and the more i look at the sims in this game, the less I want to bash their ugly faces in with a shovel. I mean their looks are growing on me. They do seem to be a little bit more natural looking I guess. After I spend about 45 mins in CAS, i tend to come out with a sim doesn’t make me cringe. It would be nice if they had more hair options. I guess they spent most of the time creating their spiffy new outside locations that you can’t enter. There are a few places that you can follow your sims in. Like the gym, and the….yeah…… It would be cool if you can go to a resturant, grocery store, or the movies with your sims. Instead of waiting outside like the getaway car in a bank robbery gone wrong. But they can go to the beach, and to the park and they can fish now too!
The outside world is beautiful, they definitely did a good job with creating every last detail of Sunset Valley, down to the very light breeze you can see blowing on all the plant life in your game. In fact i think they may have spent too much time on that, and less time on the actual Sims. Maybe they should have just came out with a new game called The Neighborhood?
I personally think they could have done a lot more if they prolonged the release again. Maybe start creating new animations instead of recycling sims 2 animations. Work out some of the kinks, maybe strive to release glitch free game at least once in their life time. And what’s up with the nuclear launcher? Now every little picture you snap is imediately attached to the launcher, and now if you get patches and updates you have to do it through the launcher or EA’s Fail download manager? Yikes, and don’t forgot the random crashing at the loading screen that happens whenever you try to launch the game via the launcher. At least that’s what happened to me, I had to bypass the launcher completely, now the problem is solved.
I probably won’t be playing this game that much. Maybe when i start seeing more custom content popping up. I might create a short, with it. I love the fact that the challenge of creating movies is back. With The Sims 2 it became so easy thus making it boring after a while. So far the films I’ve seen outside of advertisements or videos created by EA, have been really good. So I may try some machimina with the sims 3, i won’t rule that out. So yeah I have mixed feelings, it’s not a completely bad game, it just needs a little work. I can predict a few expansion ideas that might start surfacing based on what you can currently do with the game now. Let’s just hope those expansions won’t destroy the very fragile system it’s installed on.
