Review by C. Allen for The Sims 3 Ambitions
Rating:
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.

Review by J. Griswold for The Sims 3 Ambitions
Rating:
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

Review by Ella M. Bowman for The Sims 3 Ambitions
Rating:
Now that I’ve had this expansion for a couple days, I feel like I can give it an educated review. I feel as though my expectations were not quite met. The game is fun but monotonous and not very challenging. For example, I can spend a few minutes renovating someone’s living room and they will think it looks “good.” Not bad, not great, just good. I only got one glowing/great review, the rest were all good. This doesn’t motivate me to spend more than a few minutes on each room because I seem to always end up with the same results. I would have liked more variation and something to work up to.

I agree with the other reviewers who said it is near impossible to manage the rest of your Sim family when you have one of your Sims involved in a profession. Unless they are self-employed and just work strictly from home, your focus will revolve around your “professional Sim.” I have often arrived home to find my other Sims standing around starving or exhausted on account of me forgetting to target my house more often while my professional Sim is out on a job. This could probably be dealt with, it’s just obnoxious to flash from the professional Sim to my Sim’s spouse to their kids to see where they all are and what they all need.

Overall though, I enjoy the new skills and as long as I am careful to not play too much initially, I should be able to maintain an interest in the game. I am going to take it slowly so I don’t get bored, and might save the firefighter career for down the road when I need something new to jazz up my Sims.