[intro music]
I just bought the first of no doubt many expansions for the Sims 3: World Adventures.
And you know what the first thing is that I noticed when picking it up?
The price tag, FORTY dollars.
This absolutely caught me off guard, hasn't every sins expansion been thirty dollars in the past?
What could they possibly deliver an expansion that is worth 40 bucks?
Well hopefully i will answer that question in the review to follow.
World Adventures is an expansion and of course works just the same whether you have the
collectors edition, the regular retail game
you just need the Sims 3. I bought mine at Target and actually
only paid 35 dollars for it since its on sale this week
Here's a bit of advice from a former Target employee:
if you're going to buy anew game right after it comes out especially if it's an EA game always check Target first
EA and Target have a sort of strange deal going on behind the scenes
they almost always have it on sale so being $35 did make the price a little bit better but it's
still a lot for an expansion in my opinion so what do you get for the money?
Well, you might get a lot of aggravation getting the game to actually work.
It took me over an hour to install the game and all the patches that you need to download
there's like four of those.
And once it's finally installed all the patches properly the game didn't have any sound
and then it wouldn't save my game at all
Honestly, the best way to get the game to work for sure is to remove your old save games,
delete any mods you may have, uninstall the whole game and start all over from scratch.
Obviously that's not ideal and you can get it to work otherwise but I found
that many of the bugs and the game disappeared when i started a new neighborhood.
Could just be me though.
Although I've seen quite a few people complaining online.
The premise of World Adventures is that now your sims can go on a vacation and
have adventures around the world, go figure.
I've always been disappointed with the previous vacation expansions
like Sims Vacation and Bon Voyage 'cos of all the loading times and the fact that
it just seemed like it was missing the whole vacation aspect of it; it wasn't very fun
locations are basically the same and there weren't really any new events
All you could do was go to a different place and do the same thing you did at home
with different surroundings.
Thankfully in World Adventures that is not the case,
hence the reason it is not called World Vacations because you actually do have adventures.
If you've played Sims Castaway Stories you'll know exactly what to expect here
You'll take a sim to an exotic location and try to solve everyone's problems through puzzles
including your own
There are three locations to choose from: China, France and Egypt all with their appropriate sim...ifiedness.
First time around you can only stay for 3 days since you have a travel visa to keep up with
You can upgrade your visa;
the more adventures you complete and eventually you stay there long enough
go on enough adventures you can buy property
First you arrive at the basecamp and you can really do whatever you want from there
there's a board where sims will post adventures for you to go on and there's
also a little town nearby to complete different small activities
There's also shops and houses, new sims, unique items
The adventures themselves though really sets this expansion apart from any other one before.
These involve exploring tombs, finding rare items,
talking to and manipulating other sims and stuff like that
They really make the game feel like a game
For once your sims will have a real and defined purpose if only for a short time
Exploring tombs really exploit this idea to its fullest
each tomb is complete with multiple levels traps secrets puzzles and of course
plenty of loot
The expected nods are there to Indiana Jones movies and stuff like that
but it's not all derivative and thankfully they are fun to solve even though they're basically the same for each location
you also have new items you'll need to plan ahead to use such as a shower in a can and dried food
without these your sim will probably go crazy and possibly die
even though dying is pretty hard to do in here
the entire adventure setup is very light hearted and fun, of course: It's a Sims game
and there's no sign of local law enforcement so you're pretty much free to camp out on an ancient monument
Or whatever else you want to do really
another nice addition to the game are new skills, traits, and lifetime rewards
these include things like photography, martial arts and nectar collecting which
is the sim version of being a wine connoisseur
Photography is my favorite and really adds a very different dimension to every part of the game even when you go back home.
You can use filters and different lenses once you get better at it
and it adds a new thing to collect: photographs
Who would have guessed.
You can sell these are you can just go around and collect every type of photograph in a collection
much the same you would with collecting rocks in a collection, or...dead bodies...
whatever you collect.
Strangely there's hardly any new items included in the game
barely any clothes at all
Except for some adventurer style outfits so this was a bit disappointing
What few new items there are are pretty much just based on
something that you would find on your adventure anyways
however there is a new pagoda asian roof style as well as roof ornaments which are kind of interesting
and finally you can build basements and cellars, the first sim game to do that
and you'll need to do these in order to collect and store wine but you can also
make completely awesome steampunk torture dungeons
not that I would ever do that or anything.
[classical music]
My problem with this expansion is, uh, the whole thing.
[groan]
Compared to have free and open TS3 feels
going on a vacation feels like an immense burden
the loading times are pretty long in between areas and taking any more than
one sim is an absolute nightmare and you should just not do it
I ended up sending one sim at a time to complete the chores abroad since you can
only stay for a few days at a time the first time you go
I ended up sending my extra sims I left at home to my torture dungeon while i was on vacation
so I don't have to deal with them.
And it's expensive! Usually a trip can end up costing a couple of thousand Simoleons just for sending one sim
sure you'll make money along the way but it's not always a lot
also the adventures themselves really make the game feel like it's doing something it wasn't meant to do
the sims is all about freedom and random events but the adventures feel really
linear and constrictive compared to everything else; not everyone is going to like this.
it's the chunk of the game and it is still pretty fun but it feels like it's
adding something I never asked for
What I wanted were more items, more skills, more ways to interact with the sims around me
and better torture dungeons.
And I got all the above yes, but in very limited amounts.
Mostly what I got was this new adventure mode which is fun and different but it's
not exactly what i was looking for in a Sims game.
Do is it worth paying forty dollars for? I would say no way.
The basements and the skills that it gives you aren't worth that much
and the adventure mode is not going to be for everyone
and with the first stuff pack coming out in February of 2010
hopefully the lack of new items will be taken care of
because all those downloadable ones online do not count
World Adventures does give someone looking for more of a role-playing
experience something to do and learning the new skills and secret items can be fun
I would say the expansion is probably worth about twenty five dollars and
really that's kind of what i paid
You see the game actually comes with ten dollars worth of Sim points to use in the Sim store
I guess that's supposed to make you feel like you're paying less but I would have
just much rather them taken ten dollars off the price to begin with
instead of giving worthless virtual points
Expansion has its charm but in my opinion it just costs too much for too little charm
Un fortunately I don't see it going down in price anytime soon
these expansions never do so you will need to make the call to buy it or not yourself.