The Sims 3: Ambitions Review

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I have been playing Sims since The Sims 2 was released and I haven't felt much excitement playing The Sims 3 until I bought a copy of The Sims 3: Ambitions. I, too, became quickly bored with World Adventures, and was hoping this new expansion was a bit more substantial than the last. When I was through with my first 8-hour game-play session with Ambitions, I was left with a new-found love of the Sims and also some new gripes.

First, I must say that I loved going through the Stylist Profession and liked that I did not complete the whole entire profession in one gaming binge. I enjoyed being actively involved in my Sims' career path and I enjoyed making Sims over. I personally have a lot of custom content installed and the residents of my town ended up getting much-needed styling. The most valuable new addition in this profession was the new hair options for men. (Previously, I repeatedly used the same hairstyle for many male Sims, as I hated all the other styles and custom hair for men is not abundantly available.) There are several new hair options for female Sims as well, but I don't use them since I have so many custom options that are much more attractive. While you do only receive 2-3 job opportunities per work day as a stylist, you can go back to the salon once you complete those opportunities and continue to style other Sims to gain job experience, and you can also buy a drafting table for your Sim to research new design ideas and further increase your job experience, which allows you to be promoted.

Active participation in professions is very time consuming, which I love and am annoyed by at the same time. Like the reviewer before me stated, if you have multiple Sims in your household, there isn't really much time in a day to be actively involved in their lives when you are so busy with your Sim with an active profession. I found myself only tending to my other Sims' needs when my Stylist Sim had a day off. If there is a way to send your Sim to their Ambitions profession and turn off the active involvement for a period of time, I have not found it yet, and it's been impossible for me to fulfill opportunities for other Sims in the household when my one professional Sim is always busy. This is my biggest gripe about Ambitions so far, but compared to World Adventures and The Sims 3 base game, this expansion is quite impressive.

I also added a SimBot to my household. I did not have an issue with my SimBot breaking thingsin fact, she repairs everything that breaks and came to my household with a good amount of Handiness skill. This SimBot is a robot that you can control just like any other Sim, but the robot has different and interesting needs.

Another thing I love about this new expansion pack is that it contains elements of Open for Business from The Sims 2. For example, my child Sim can make numerous baked goods using his toy oven and sell them at a newly-purchasable baked good stand in front of the house, and anything your Sim creates can be sold for good money (depending on your skill level) at the consignment shop. You can also choose to be self-employed and make good money fishing, farming, sculpting, painting, and more, and I really enjoy the options that this new expansion pack allows for.

Overall:

This is definitely a major improvement over World Adventures, and I think this new expansion pack allows for a more active and engaging gaming experience, which I personally like, aside from the fact that I am alienating my other Sims. I think this EP was worth the money because of how it changes game-play and doesn't just add new items, interactions, and wishes as some other EPs have done. I can't wait to explore more professions, and hopefully there will be more available to us all in the future. Happy Simming!

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I got my game delivered on Friday, May 28 and was very excited to get it installed and start playing. This really looked like it would be a ton of fun and it was at first. The new town that you get with this expansion, Twinbrook, is beautiful. The EA Sims team did a wonderful job creating this new town. There are lots of new things to see (I really like the "swampy" area, it's kinda creepy and spooky). They also added several new items with this expansion and I think the new laundry system adds some more realism to the game. I thought it was kind of dumb at first but it is kind of neat to see them do laundry now.

As for the careers, I started off with the new architect career since I love to build houses. It seems more like an interior designer career to me. All of the jobs were to redo some particular room so there was very little building to do. This may change after a while but it got boring doing the same types of rooms over and over so I moved on.

Next, I tried the ghost hunter. Again, this was a lot of fun in the beginning but I soon realized that I get the same types of jobs over and over. There are about 5 different types of jobs for your ghost hunter sim to perform. These range from collecting "casper" looking spirits to investigating paranormal activity inside the rabbit holes around town. This career got boring fast too. You do the same types of jobs over and over and you only get maybe 2 or three jobs each night. I had my sim do these and he was back home way before his job time was supposed to be over. Also, it didn't take me very long to reach the top of the career.

After I had been ghost hunting a while, I got my sim hitched to a sim lady who registered as a self employed sculptor. This is probably my favorite of the careers I have tried so far. She sculpts some pretty cool looking statues after her skill gets high enough. When she first started, she was sculpting chairs, toilets, and other household items and it was pretty humorous to see these. I like that she starts out with a big block of whichever material I choose for her to use (clay, topiary, wood, ice, etc.) and I get a nice surprise when she finishes. If you want a particular sculpture,you can have your sim sulpt it if he or she has already learned to make. After my sim's skill was high enough, the sculptures sell for a high simolean price too. So, between her sculptures and my ghost hunter's salary plus selling spirits to the Science Lab, they got pretty rich rather quickly.

My sculptor's lifetime wish is to maximiaze her painting, sculpting and inventing skills so I also have an inventor's table. Most of the stuff that she has invented is useless crap that you can sit around your house as nothing more than decoration (like a bobbing llama head that drinks). She has invented the digger thing but it woke up everyone in the house when I tried to use it and then the hole only had scrap in it. The digger may prove to be interesting though from what I've seen in videos online.

The only other career I have tried so far is the stylist and I hated it. I created a stylist to be married to my architect. Each time she offers to give a makeover to another sim, it opens a new CAS window where you style the sim however they request (new makeup, new hairstyle, new everyday wear, etc.). At the start of this career, no matter what I chose in CAS, the sim always came out looking horrible. It got on my nerves so I gave up on it very quickly. I don't see the point of doing anything to them if they are just going to come out looking bad.

I haven't tried any of the other careers yet. I did get a simbot and it annoys me. The sim couple had a baby and it would always go get it out of the crib, even if it was sleeping. The baby has been pretty cranky with this thing around. The sim babies have always kind of worked my nerves anyways but they are necessary if you want to play a family but they really are annoying with this thing around unless I watch him and make him leave the kid alone so it can get some sleep. It's handy to have it do the laundry and some cleaning but it keeps breaking stuff in the house when I try to have it do upgrades. It's handiness skill is high but it always breaks whatever it's working on so I hate the thing. It just kind of gets in the way.

One thing that did surprise me and I thought was a nice touch is that as your sims progress in their careers, they will get a notification that the mayor is honoring them at city hall. If they make it there in time, they get medals, commemorative plaques or even keys to the city. My ghost hunter even received something that looks like a small graveyard. It's really kind of cool looking. I forget what it's called though. I do think that the recogonition for outstanding work is pretty cool and it was totally unexpected for me.

All in all, this EP is kind of fun but it is VERY repetitive and I can see it getting old fast. There were not very many new items which adds to the sims everyday lives. There is the laundry system, trampoline and a couple of other things though. Oh, and the "Curly" hair that you get when you register the game is horrid!

If you like the new task oriented sims that it seems we have to live with now, you'll like this. As for me, I really wish they would give us an EP that gives the sims more open activities like some of the EP's of the past (Nightlife, please!). I don't care for this new style of play that the EA Sims team keeps coming up with. I miss the days of the open ended gameplay. Sure, it got repetitive too but I at least controlled more of the sims lives than I do now and that was what I liked about it. I mean the game is called The SIMS, it should focus on SIMS and not a pretty new town or repetitive tasks that are far too easy and get way too boring way too fast. For the way the Sims has now progressed (whether I like it or not) this is a decent expansion. I can have my sims do the painting, sculpting, writing, etc. and register them as self employed and still get some fun out of it though so it's not completely horrible for me either.

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I suppose by now I should know better. The second expansion pack for the Sims 3 promised great things, much like both the base game, and World Adventures. Like both, it fails to truly deliver.

Basically, like the previous installments of the sims 3, this EP is little more than a rehash of a previous one-in this case, Open For Business. Sadly though, it doesn't really play as well. If you are interested in crafting and selling items, instead of opening up your own store, You send your items to a consignment shop, which in turn sells your items, and gives you a cut of the money earned.

The new "Professions", as they are called in game, are interesting enough; inventor, sculptor, fire fighter, Private investigator, Stylist, architect, tattoo artist, Paranormal investigator. There might be a couple more, but these are the ones I explored in any real detail. As I said, the professions seemed interesting, at first. The new items for use in increasing your skills for each profession were also fairly neat. But the professions themselves are a bit of a letdown. For Jobs that require you to gather information, or hunt in some fashion, all you really do is run from lot to lot, trying to fulfill certain requirements, in order to get to the next step of the assignment, much like the quests in WA. After the first couple of jobs, it gets very repetitive. For the more creative professions,you spend most of your time crafting or designing. Again, interesting at first, but after your 3rd or fourth tattoo or hair appointment, it gets pretty boring.

Adding this to the severely limited amount of time in a Sim day, and what was already a hectic game of time management for your sims, becomes a race against the clock to get anything done at all. It didn't really make for an enjoyable time.

However, there are a couple of bright spots in this EP, so all is not lost. The inventor profession has some fairly cool items you can make: Mining equipment for drilling large holes in the ground; a fruit vaccuum to make harvesting a bit easier; the time machine is actually a kind of neat addition to the the existing rabbit holes. For sculpting, I didn't play around too much, but I did get to the point where I had several materials to choose from in the creation of each sculpture, as well as the ability to sculpt other sims, which again was kind of neat. The idea of the tattoo station was neat, and once CC creators get working on designs, we may see some really great options for tattoos.

The best part of the EP though, is the new town, Twinbrook. It is well put together, and I prefer it over both Sunset Valley and Riverview. It showcases all of the new Profession related lots quite nicely. wandering around the town was much more fun than much of the actual gameplay.

So, all in all this EP was ok, but for me, it really didn't live up to the promise. If you enjoyed the quest based gameplay in WA, you will probably enjoy this EP as well. If you were looking for a little more freedom of gameplay, this isn't quite it.

J

Honest reviews on The Sims 3: Ambitions

This game is a LOT like World Adventures. The Sims 3 is becoming less and less like it's predecessors, because it is changing from controling a family to having to focus in on 1 sim. You can't focus on your other sims while your sim is doing 1 of the new "professions". The new jobs are fun at first but get boring with the same thing over and over again. There is a lot of community requested features in the game that make it more fun and realistic, like the laundry system. You can now also own any community lot to make money off it. That is fun too, but you can't have traditional employees or really work on the lot unless you are cleaning up plates, puddles, and trash. I would say if you don't like World Adventures, skip this one.

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I play Sims 3 almost exclusively these days and I was looking forward to the expansion and the new professions. Unfortunately, I felt ambitions was rather lacking. While I like the new careers, I felt it was annoying to have to follow 1 sim around and leave the other sims unattended without a time stop feature. This is really tough if you have more than 1 sim in your house, as stuff happens while you are away. I also didn't like the missions. Banishing ghosts just requires you go to a house and point and click. There is no particular challenge or skill involved. And while you do this, your sims household is left unattended. The difficulty does ramp up after a while, so all is not lost, however, I just didn't find it enjoyable to miss out on the household fun, while 1 sim was out doing a mindless job. I would've like a 'time stop feature' which would freeze the current house and let you get back to it, and let the other sim return when done so that you can enjoy both things.

There is also an unfinished quality to the game. While I enjoyed the addition of the new traits, I didn't find anything really exceptional about most of the content. The careers I play tested (ghost hunter and fireman) were dull.

I will keep playing sims 3 ambitions, but I wasn't loving it like I liked the expansions for Sims 2.