World of Apple

Description: THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS! Play with your Sim using touch and accelerometer controls while exploring stunning 3D open-world environments. Customize your Sim with personality traits and physical characteristics, as you decide whether to fulfill their destiny…or not. Do good or mischief. Fall in love or watch them get dumped. Pick a fight or make a friend. Good or bad, enjoy the ride with The Sims as they experience everything “real” life has to offer.

Developer – EA Mobile

The Sims 3 – ($9.99) £5.99 – iTunes

EA Games have been working with The Sims series for a long time now, with which they have had great success. The series has sold surplus of 100 million copies worldwide and to date is the best-selling PC franchise in history. For these reasons and the fact that I have played The Sims in the past I had some great expectations for this game. It has been specifically made for the iPhone/iPod touch and there has clearly been a lot of effort put in.

When I have played previous versions of The Sims I have found that initially the game is very addictive and comes packed with a lot of entertainment, but once I have made myself a mansion, maximised all my Sims skills and so forth then I just lose interest. This game is a scaled-down version of The Sims, but it has moved away from the traditional style, where you would spend a lot of time producing your dream home (which is still possible), and moves more towards looking after your sim and individualising their personalities. This still involves improving various skills such as cooking, fishing, repairing and gardening; but now there is a lot more involvement with how your Sim socialises.

When creating your Sim you can customise their aesthetics and define their personality; this will coincide with how they interact with other Sims and will affect their wish list, which is the goals that your Sim will want to achieve. This opens the opportunity of replayability by creating different characters and developing your Sims along various paths of life; either make your Sim climb the corporate ladder to success or become the town nuisance by annoying your neighbourhood and breaking into their homes to use their fridge. The goals that your Sim dreams up adds a little more excitement to the game, giving that little bit of variety to stop you getting bored of the repetitive lifestyle. Even without the consideration of replayability, there is a magnificent amount of gaming hours.

Personalize your house as you please with a panoply of household items such as T.V’s, Fridges and Couches. This is limited to the fact that you can’t build a house like in the full computer version, but this again isn’t really the key focus of the game.  There is also no fast-forward, which means that tasks can sometimes be a little slow. I don’t really want to watch my Sim watch T.V in real time. Fast-forward is substituted with the game skipping time at work and time when your Sim is asleep.

Apart from just looking after your Sim, socialising and getting a job there are mini-games to boost your Sims skills. These take advantage of the iPhones accelerometer. For example you can go fishing where you flick the phone to catch the fish. At first these mini-games are great but after a while they become repetitive. Whenever you want to feed your Sim there are two methods of doing so, you can either give him a quick snack, which isn’t that satisfying and becomes very expensive or you can cook him a proper meal. To do this you have to buy some recipes; personally memorize the ingredients for when you go to the shop and buy the various products; then go home and cook the meal, where there is a mini-game. This involves picking up the various pans and shaking them using the accelerometer to cool them down until the food is cooked. I personally find shopping for food can sometimes be quite a drag in the real world, so I start to question why I’m doing it a virtual world. Also household electronics break far too often for my liking, which is where your Sims repairing skills come in to use.

One thing that I had a major problem with was that the game would crash and return to the home screen on a regular basis. I thought this was very important to mention as I nearly deleted this app before solving the problem. If you download the app, then you will need to restart your iPhone/iPod touch before playing the game otherwise it will crash a lot. The game still crashes occasionally and the only current solution to this is to restart your device about once a week; as after restarting, it won’t crash for quite some time.

Initially I found that the controls were not well explained and do take some getting used to. When selecting an item that has a lot of options for your Sims to interact with, it isn’t obvious that you can scroll through to see more options. One of my main confusions was that I was set a goal to grow some vegetables, but the game didn’t explain that I couldn’t do that until I had upgraded my house. I found quite a lot of these examples through out the game.

Pros

• Fantastic gameplay and very addictive
• Create your Sim and assign their style and personality
• Repeatability with varying gameplay each time.
• Huge amount of gaming hours

Cons

• Controls are sometimes awkward and confusing
• Even after restarting, it still has a tendancy to crash

Verdict

Overall EA Games have done wonders with this game (ignoring the occasional crash) and used most of the best attributes from previous versions to give you the best of what the Sims is truly about. Although the game does eventually become quite tedious, initially the game is highly entertaining and brings many hours of gameplay. If you have enjoyed previous versions of the Sims then you will without a doubt love this game.