Barnacle Bay is all about the pirate theme, and for the most part it does that well. You can replace your house’s windows with portholes and put a barrel in your living room and pretend it’s full of grog. But what you can’t do is engage in pirate-y gameplay. You won’t suddenly get into swordfights in bars or take up a career of terrorizing the high seas. When making our own Threepwood family, we were dismayed to see that there was no Lifetime Wish option for “Become a mighty pirate,” nor could we adjust our Sims’ personalities to make them more pirate-like. All Barnacle Bay really offers is new aesthetics.

And aesthetics can only get you so far. The restaurant shaped like a wrecked pirate ship? Looks great – shame you can’t look inside it, though. And while Goldbeard’s Gym may have a great name, it contains the exact same treadmills and weight systems you can find in any other Sims 3 building. Honestly, seeing cool pirate items just makes it more frustrating that there’s no pirate gameplay to go with it.

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