Time to crack my knuckles, drink some coffee and start typing. Get ready, because we’re reviewing The Sims Social!
Intro and Create A Sim
When you first load The Sims Social, the first thing you see is Create A Sim. It has the basics that you’d expect from a Sims base game.
Choose a name, gender, skin color, personality and then you customize your Sim. Everything from hair color and style to the color of socks. There are a lot of small customizations too. Such as freckles, moles, a scar and more!
In CAS you can sample hair, clothes and other options my moving the cursor over them.
Outfit types include Casual, Swimwear, Sleepwear, Formal and Sport.
Under each type of outfit you have Special, Head, Top, Bottom and Shoes.
Under head you have hair color, hair style, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, facial
hair, hats and glasses.
Under both Tops and Bottoms you have tops/bottoms, dresses/skirts, swimwear and top/bottom accessories.
Under Shoes is Shoes and Socks
There are 8 different skin colors to choose from.
There are 9 different personality types to choose from.
The 9 Personality types are: Athletic, Creative, Villain, Socialite, Rocker,
Romantic, Introvert, Tycoon and Geek!
You can re-enter CAS at any time by clicking the Clothes button
Moving In
Once you complete your Sim, you will see your house and be welcomed by the Sims Social version of Bella! She’ll give you a quick tutorial on earning EXP/Simoleons, motives and visiting friends. The first friend you visit is her. We’ll get into visiting and interacting with friends a little later.
Your Home and the User Interface
As you can see from above, the game has a very clean and simple User Interface.
At the top you have a few meters, they are: Simoleons, SimCash, Social Points, Energy and Player Level/EXP. You also have the setting button. Below that is a group of six small buttons. These buttons are: toggle full screen, Zoom in, Zoom out, walls down, half walls and full walls. There’s also a gift and an invite button bellow that.
The bottom UI is split into two halves. Left top you have a pic of your Sim and their dating status. Top Center is their motives and mood. Top right is the clothes, shop and craft button.
On the bottom left is your home/lot value. Bottom center is your Facebook friends/neighbors and at the bottom left is Bella.
Shop Mode
Shop Mode is a combination of build and buy modes from previous Sims Games.
Shop Mode has five sections – Special, Shop, Build, Store and Energy.
The shop mode music is the build/buy mode music from the Sims 3.
Most objects cost Simoleons, some Simoleons and SimCash and some objects you can ONLY buy with SimCash.
Build
In this mode, you can add different size rooms, doors, windows, change the floors and wallpaper.
Build mode – Viewing different doors.
Craft
The craft feature allows you to “make” special objects when you have a certain number of specific types of EXP. You can see a few examples in the pic above.
Storage
This is your inventory. As you can see in the pic above, you can store many types of items here.
Energy
These special objects give your Sim an extra boost of Energy and can ONLY be bought with SimCash.
Personality and Traits
Earlier in the CAS section of this review, I mentioned that you get to choose the personality of your Sim. Let’s focus on this now. There are two sections to the personality of a Sim. There is Personality Type and Traits. Earlier i mentioned that there are nine personality types to choose from when creating your Sim.
Athletic, Creative, Villain, Socialite, Rocker, Romantic, Introvert, Tycoon and Geek.
There are also NINE Unlockable Traits to choose from.
Slob, Steel bladder, Neat, Super Mechanic, Insane, Ogre, Ninja, Great Kisser and Night Owl.
Once you unlock them, you can change, sell and upgrade traits
Note: A Sim can ONLY have a total of SIX Traits.
Misc Info and Thoughts
Sound effects used in The Sims Social are from The Sims 3.
There are certain activities, build/buy objects, plants and etc that you have to be at a certain level to unlock before you can use them.
Unlike Sims 1, 2 and 3, you can not rotate or change the angle of the camera, but you can zoom in and out.
The game has a Sims 1 feel to it.
It appears that the only way to pause the game is to go into shop mode.
Sims have high freewill.
You can talk on the phone and visit friends to raise the Social Motive.
When loading the game, players might see the image below. Reminds you of the Liam error message from the Sims 3 Forums doesn’t it?
Closing Thoughts
Expecting to play a stripped down version of The Sims, I instead ended up playing a Flash based spin-off instead. Like Medieval, My Sims and The Sims Stories series of games, The Sims Social is in a league of its own. Whilst there may be loading issues from time to time, i expect that this game will be loved by both Old and New School Simmers the same.
With the amount of build/buy items included and the Sim feel of the game, i highly recommend it! My only complaint is that there is no real-time interacting with your Facebook friends. When you visit their homes, You are interacting with a NPC of your friend(s). And with that, happy Simming!
If you have any questions or need help, EA has created a forum for The Sims Social. Sims Social Forums
It’s a good review. I think it’s adapted well for the FB climate – it’s a good solid Playfish-y type game that will probably benefit from added features as it stabilises.
I think it stays a LOT truer to the Sims brand than Medieval. I’m not even tempted to call it a spin-off, it seems like The standard Sims recipe tweaked for social networking.
That said, it won’t stand alone without considerably expansion.
Also worth mentioning is that you can sell and change your traits. Also, you can upgrade each trait to get addition benefits from (I, like many, went straight for Ninja!)
I’ve added a few neighbours, and we’re interacting within the limits of the game. It’s true we can’t really “hang out” in real time, but I suspect that might change, given the “there’s nobody here currently” messages you sometimes get at home when your social goes down.
Thanks for the addition info about the traits! You’re right, there’s lots of room for expansion.