Barking up the wrong tree!
So, my Sims have got pets….again. Regardless of EA’s blatant recycling of past ideas I was actually quite looking forward to this game. I wasn’t necessarily expecting game of the year or anything but just something I would enjoy playing. Given that I’m a fan of past sim games anyway (and yes this probably does have something to do with my gender), I didn’t expect this to be any different. Sadly this game has been my biggest disappointment to date, even worse than when I found out Santa wasn’t real. I would even go as far as to say that it just plain sucks.
I would say that the main problem with this game lies in that they tried to cram too much in to a game that had proven to be a success in even its simplest of forms. I had enjoyed the improvements made when Sims 3 was first released on pc. It looked better, there were new skills to learn and therefore new jobs to sign up for too. Yet it never got too complicated. The way in which you play the sims has always pretty much remained the same until now. You get up, you eat, you wee, you learn the skills you need, you get promoted, get to level 10, make your house really bitching, rinse and repeat. Then you get bored and go onto something else. But it was always fun while it lasted. Now they’ve attempted to break away from this tried and tested format and somehow it just doesn’t work. There are now a set of stories to follow which is all well and good but my mind just goes into overload when I’m trying to finish the stories and go to work, and feed my dog, and go ghost hunting at night and work my way through the challenges all at the same time. Now say this is because I’m simple all you like but games such as Skyrim do exactly the same thing (minus the weeing) but they do it in a way that doesn’t make my head spin.
However, I don’t even think that not knowing which way to look first is my main problem with this game. In fact its something much more trivial. You see I seem to have encountered a bug that really really gets on my last nerve. Whenever I set my options to disable ageing so I can work my way through the stories my dog keeps on ageing at random intervals that even if I had this option on just wouldn’t make sense. Then the game keeps freezing or even deleting my saves completely and to be honest I just can’t be bothered with it. It’s far more hassle than what’s its worth.
I’m just stunned that this game turned out to be this bad given that even the Sims 3 wasn’t bad when it was released for consoles. It was a bit different but nothing that affected the game play in any way. In fact new additions such as the challenges did add to the experience in this case. As I think the new elements of the Sims 3 pets would have done had they not all been bundled together in a big ball and hurled directly into the middle of a game that already worked just fine.
As the old saying goes ‘If it aint broke don’t fix it’.