There are two kinds of people who play 'The Sims'.

The first group are a strange sort who bizarrely, and sincerely, actually cares about their little sims. They spend literally hours fine-tuning every aspect of their digital pet and its surroundings and take utter delight in the fact that their sim finally has enough money to buy that new couch.

The second group are people like me, who from the get-go try and break the game and create hilariously inappropriate situations. Our sims always have at least one expletive in their names and they tend to set themselves on fire — a lot.

Since EA announced the game in early 2008, both of the abovementioned groups have nurtured high hopes for 'The Sims 3'. Whether you'll consider those hopes fulfilled really depends on how you want to play the game.

Alas, for troublemakers such as myself, there is little new joy in 'The Sims 3'. In fact, the game's designers seem to have gone to some lengths to thwart us.

It is frustratingly hard to make your sim look outrageously stupid, for example. During character creation I giddily tried to make my sim as fat as humanly possible. Unfortunately, even with the slider maxed out, my unluckily name sim seemed only to have had a particularly large lunch — not quite the realism I was hoping for, especially from a game developed by the most obese nation on earth.

Sure, you can still refuse to give your sims toilet breaks or put them in rooms with no doors, but that gets old pretty quickly. I was hoping that I could finally turn my house into an opium den or a brothel or something and make my sim the most violent crime boss that ever there was. Sadly, I dream on.

For people who take their simming a bit more seriously, the newest game in the series has more to offer. The biggest new feature is the fact that towns are completely open-ended. Instead of having the daft system of disjointed neighbourhoods, you can now freely wander about in your leafy little suburb. This is a huge improvement and really lends a greater sense of community to the whole experience.

Another new feature is the social trait system. Your sim can choose from a wide variety of traits that affect various aspects of gameplay, such as how the sim will interact with others.

Unfortunately the new system is not implemented as well as it could have been. For example, it doesn't really affect the difficulty of the game as much as it should. My first sim was fat, absent-minded, childish, cowardly, evil and inappropriate. Surprisingly, he got along rather well and had very little trouble surviving or even thriving in a neighbourhood that should really despise him.

On the other hand a sim that is brave, ambitious and friendly doesn't have it that much easier. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice addition and provides a different slant to every new game you create, but it just feels a little empty.

Your sims also now have long-term goals apart from their more nagging everyday ones. Adding additional goals is an interesting way of trying to extend the life of the game. Boredom, after all, is the main reason people stop playing. After a while there simply isn't anything new to do. The rewards for these goals are a bit hit and miss though, and striving for the long-term goals feels a bit pointless at times.

Like the previous games, 'The Sims 3' scales very well and it should run pretty smoothly on most computers. Take note, however, that if you have a slow machine, you might die waiting for the game to load. There are about four loading screens you have to suffer through before you can start your first real game and it gets very tedious, even on monster gaming PCs.

The biggest problem with 'The Sims 3' is undoubtedly its lack of content. If you have been playing 'The Sims 2' you will find the lack of variety almost unbelievable, even if you only bought a couple of expansions for the previous game.

Now this in itself is not a calamity. After all, the previous titles also had little content when they were first launched. What is outrageous, however, is the fact that Electronic Arts is charging real money for item downloads from their website.

So what they are essentially saying is "oh, we actually did design a decent amount of content for the game, but we thought we'd only give you half for R350, and make you pay extra for the rest". This is criminal, particularly when you consider the fact that they still plan to sell boxed expansions.

'The Sims 3' is, at its heart, a major step up from its predecessors. The new features make the game feel more like a real simulation than ever before. One gets the feeling, however, that it is merely the skeleton of a great game. Unless you are a rabid 'Sims fan', you should probably wait until the second or third expansion has fleshed it out a bit before you invest.

8.0/10

Buy this game: PC

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