2.5 stars out of 5.

I’ve loved playing The Sims for years, and I was delighted to find this social-networking version. I’ve been playing regularly since a few days after it went public. Sadly, as a “hard core” player, visiting many times a day has shown that many gameplay elements are severely broken.

As it’s a “social” game, you’re expected to share back-and-forth with your game “neighbours”. Unfortunately, the internal messaging/sharing system is severely broken. Your requests often won’t get to their recipients, and when they do your friends try responses frequently vanish. The game asks you to post your in-game milestones to your wall, yet it won’t let anyone CLAIM all the simoleons from those posts. There are situations where the integration with facebook’s messaging system causes the game to hang and other random crashes. Your sim’s condition completely unpredictable when you re-enter the game – I’ve left for 2 mins and found almost every stat red upon returning, while leaving for hours has left a virtually all-green sim. And I won’t even go into detail about the ridiculous real-money pricing on in-game items – to buy just a few of skill items, it costs more than it cost me to furnish my first real-life apartment! Considering there’s already sponsorship from Dunkin’ Donuts and other exceptional income opportunities from in-game product ads, EA is clearly being greedy, trying to make this a MAJOR cash cow (forget about the fact that it is an advertisement and gateway drug for their not-free-at-all-expansion-pack-ridden free-standing Sims games).

I don’t begrudge a business making money, but between the bugs and the outrageous SimCash store, I can’t endorse this at this time for anyone except those who may play for only a few minutes per week. Instead, buy The Sims 3 and ALL the expansions – it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

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