When it comes to talking about expansion packs for The Sims, it’s always going to be difficult to come up with a definitive opinion on its quality. After all, playing The Sims 3 is a very personal experience. You create your funny little Sim and guide them through their life. You guide them in your own way, so if you want them to become a world renowned doctor then you will follow that path, or if you’d prefer to create a Sim with a penchant for writing, well, you get the picture.
So along comes Ambitions, the new expansion for The Sims 3. An expansion that revolves predominately around the career for your Sim, bringing a wealth of new professions including tattoo artist, sculptor, private investigator, ghost hunter, firefighter, doctor, interior designer, inventor and stylist. Let me just get it out of the way and say that the expansion itself it’s fantastic. In terms of content it brings a lot more freedom to your Sims and also adjusts the working life to genuinely emulate the real world.
Having said that, I come back to my initial point. If none of these careers appeal to you as a player then there would be little reason to invest in the add on. For those whose eyes lit up at reading that list of jobs then allow me to divulge a little more.
The beauty of Ambitions is how it expands the working life of a Sim. In the original release sending your Sim to work could be rather tiresome. They trundle off into a building and you select what they do in work from a drop down menu. You could make them work hard, kiss up to the boss or sleep behind the photocopier – no matter what, you make money and everyone is happy.
With each job in Ambitions that mundane system is out of the window and your Sims daily work time is controlled in more detail by yourself. Take the firefighter and ghost hunter as examples. You’ll still have working hours but you’ll be able to control each nuance while they work. As a firefighter you’ll be helping other Sims by rescuing them and in your down time you can exercise or learn mechanics in the fire station. As a ghost hunter you will be bustin’ ghosts, exorcising household items or convincing stubborn ghosts to pass over to the afterlife. If you have some downtime, then it’s worth building up your logic skill to perform better at work. It’s pleasant to be able to control these moments as your skills build up faster.
Many of the other professions are different yet again. The sculptor, tattoo artist and inventor will work from home creating items or seeing customers. The sculptor designs what you feel is best and sells each piece of art at a profit, the tattoo artist conducts business as you would expect and the inventor, well, the inventor is different yet again. A daily routine for our budding Doc Brown would be to scour rubbish dumps for scrap and return home to create something wonderful to be sold for a living.
What with this being such a large expansion too, I only dabbled in the careers that wouldn’t interest me. This highlights the point that if you’re not interested in the job, then you won’t use it. I spent little time with the stylist and interior designer as the careers, mainly because they are the character creation tool and home building tools but transformed into money making jobs.
A highlight, after the ghost hunter, has to be the private eye. Once a job is taken on, you could be searching through peoples bins and mail, you might have to coerce some information from someone or even go on a stake out. The genius here, isn’t in the jobs themselves, but in the way you can perform them. Do you wait until after dark to search through someone’s possessions? Do you butter someone up for information or bribe them, maybe you beat it out of them?
The developers have really pulled out all the stops to create such dynamic changes. In fact this expansion alone goes a long way to practically reinventing the game on the whole. Small details make you smile, like the fact that to be able to work from home you must register as self employed in order to get paid.
There is one minor frustration that creeps in with these new jobs, and that is, it becomes quite difficult to juggle the social side of your Sim. An example of this would be my first character, Spirit McEcto. (See what I did there?) He was a wonderful ghost hunter. He made a fortune taking out the ghoulies but due to him working at night, he became lonely. I tried to allow him to make friends but his work would run over time every once in a while and then he’d sleep during the day. This can also happen with the other professions, meaning that to have a really happy Sim you have to be a master at micromanagement.
Overall the expansion is worthwhile to devout Sims fans. There isn’t much more to the package besides the new jobs. There’s a few lifetime rewards to dish out, but these are tailored more to the new jobs anyway. Would I recommend it? Yes, as long as you like the jobs on offer. If not, there’s nothing else here to push you to playing it.
VideogameUK verdict: 8/10
