The Sims 3 – iPhone App Game Review

For fans of The SimsThe Sims reviews, the newest release is an automatic purchase that won’t disappoint. The Sims 3 offers amazingly powerful updates to the theory, and everyone from the uninitiated to the die-hard will find themselves with limitless entertainment.

EA has a new trick up its sleeve for The Sims 3, because you can now get the companion iPhone App version of the game as well. The game offers surprising functionality for an iPhone App, and a level of complexity and richness that makes it an App game you’ll be playing for countless hours.

The App version uses the same “personality traits” system and features an entire town just like the PC version. Your Simssims reviews are fully customizable, get jobs, gain skills, and have goals, leading you through infinite possibilities.

The graphics and controls are great, taking advantage of the furthest reaches of the iPhone capabilities.

Go fishing, make your Sim evil, fall in love, or smack someone around until you’ve got an enemy, your Sim can be and do anything you want. You’ve also got a full line of options to turn your house into a party spot, or just the perfect place to hatch your schemes.

But, in the grand scheme of things, selling The Sims is something you almost don’t have to do anymore… for the PC. What I wanted to know was how was an App going to look to me after a few weeks. I run through a lot of App games, and a lot of them are really great for a week or so, and then I never bother with them again. How was this going to fare?

The answer is that it does very well. I’ve been running through a somewhat crazy approach to the game in order to get exposure to a lot of variations on things in a short amount of time. It’s a version of playing a game that often gives you a good feel for things, but takes away whatever addictiveness a game might be aiming for. That wasn’t the case here. Even when repeatedly starting new games with increasingly bizarre trait combinations, and going through Sim life with impulse control shut off completely, the game still sucked me in.

How fun is it really to just be a complete jerk, or on a career path for which you have no valuable skills? Well, pretty fun actually.

So, the question then becomes whether or not that “replayability” really pans out. There are a lot of games that really hype their “openness” as a selling point, and sure, you can play a lot of different ways and have various careers… but, will you? You’ve taken your Sim all the way to final ranks of your career, played chess countless times, and had parties galore… are you really going to start over? About 90% of the time, my answer is no. It’s great that I have the options inherent in the open gameplay, but by the time I go through the whole game there are other fish to fry. For the full experience PC game, I want it to suck me in so much that I really will want to play again, but I was ready to forgive an App version if it didn’t quite manage that tricky feat. But, I think most people will find that they’ll take a few different roads here.

While the App version is obviously a slimmed translation of the PC release, I think you’ll be surprised by how feature-rich it really is, and by how much addiction you can pack into an App. The developers really did a great job at tweaking things with the App play experience in mind, and I think this is one I will be coming back to again and again for a long time.

Check out the trailer for the game below, and visit the Sims 3 App page here.