Let the flooding of reviews on The Sims Medieval begin!

At the 18 hour mark, though, I started to chafe against the structured gameplay. I was on my third kingdom Ambition playthrough and all the quests I encountered were the same. The quests have branching opportunities so that you can play it differently two or three times, but the end results are more or less the same. I also resented the overly-strict camera — Watcher view is crazy-far back, and building perspective defaults to a front-facing cutaway view that makes it hard to decorate rooms. And even when the game abandoned the quests during the end-game portions of a playthrough, I wasn’t happy — because now there was nothing to do and I could still only control one Sim at a time and nobody every grew, aged, or died of natural causes. And, as it turns out, the Sims Medieval doesn’t let you build your own castles.

There are other flaws I could whine about (e.g. a few glitches that forced me to quit quests, the camera getting stuck once or twice), but the bottom line is that The Sims Medieval let me down and I’m whining about it. I wanted what it gave me — the stereotype of the Middle Ages — but I didn’t want all this structure and all these restrictions. As it turns out, I wanted a re-skinned Sims 3.

GamePro – The Sims Medieval reviewed (4/5 Stars)