Reposted for the other blog I write for.:)
7 months ago I posted a mini-review of The Sims 3, Electronic Arts’ newest iteration of the life-simulator game from the series that’s sold millions of copies. There’s no sense in not continuing to milk the successful franchise for all it’s worth, but the newest and first significant expansion to The Sims 3 called World Adventures surprisingly offers a lot of new content and new game play that nicely outweighs the SGD43.90 you have to fork out for it.
For want of a better descriptor, World Adventures is really Tomb Raider, but with your Sims 3 character packing the fedora and leather jacket instead of shorts, pistols and tights. Installing the expansion adds three new large locations, each with their unique community lots, excavation and ruin sites, geographical terrain, places of interest, and residential homes.
Each location extracts popular elements of three important places around the world: China, France and Egypt, and there are oodles of context-specific visuals and gameplay that’ll immerse you in each locale. In China, houses look suitably Asian with Pagoda-like roofs. There’s authentic Chinese cuisine to learn and prepare, books to read, Martial Arts to learn, Terracotta tombs to explore and relics to collect. And in Egypt, you get huge pyramids to explore!
To get to any of the three new locations, you’ll need to fly your Sim over. And in a very nice touch, the length of period you can stay depends on your Visa level. Once you arrive, an almost RPG-centric element takes over: you look for quests on the job advertisement board, and accept to get started on them. And the quests aren’t typically of the courier pigeon sort. Some involved lengthy and multiple steps, including looking for resources, convincing locals (time to start working on your Sims’ charisma) to do something, exploration of huge ruins and underground tombs, solving puzzles, and avoiding the undead! Some of the lengthier quests will even involve you traveling between the three country locations too.
Early on you’ll get just three days of visitation. To extend the period you can stay for each visit, you’ll need to chalk up enough Visa points by completing quests. And after each visit, there’s a coo ldown period too before your Sim is ready to travel again. I imagine there’ll be some players that’ll dislike this gameplay element, but I actually like it a lot. It stops players from going on an infinite-period visit to farm everything off a location on a single visit, and instead forces players to progressively earn their right to stay and makes them plan for each visit.
There’re also three new major skills to learn: martial arts, photography, and nectar (wine) making. All three are interesting in terms of what they let your Sim too. The martial arts ability – acquired and first learned in China in the game – lets you spar with opponents, and if so interested, you can even go on a tournament circuit. Beat enough opponents and you’ll even get a title.
At the martial arts highest skill’s i.e. level 10 mastery, you’ll also gain the ability to consistently defeat the undead mummies when you go about tomb exploration. That’s an important advantage by the way: because if mummies trash you in a fight, there’s a chance you’d get cursed by the mummy, and if you fail to remove the curse in time – which involves snake charming (LOL) or completing a quest – your Sim will expire, and it’ll be the reload save game screen for you.
There’re a couple of grouches with the new expansion though. The most severe one is that the expansion adds a degree of instability to the overall game. In the about 30 hours I took to about complete all the major and most of the minor quests, I’ve experienced at least half a dozen game crashes to desktop, invisible Sims, corruption of game saves, or flat-out refusal to recognize downloaded content at the Sims store at the game launch screen. There are players in the online discussion forums complaining angrily about poor bug testing in particular. There’s also some lengthy loading time involved when transiting between countries, but thankfully once you arrive in a location, there’s no more such.
Still, all said and done, I really enjoyed my time in World Adventures. It’s added exciting and varied visuals and new game play to the original release last year, and the skills and associated additional challenges for each require a lot of time to attain and complete. Highly recommended for fans of the series.:)
Pictures from Gamespot.
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