Basically, if you’ve played Sims 1 or 2 and know of Bon Voyage and Vacation/On Holiday, you know what to expect with World Adventures. You can take your pixel dolls to China, France, or Egypt and immerse them into a very watered down version of the actual countries. It would have been sweet if your sims had to learn the languages and were standing there holding a translation book mispronouncing everything with the sims who live there just stand there and laugh, but hey, I’m a history major, not a game designer. Whilst there, the sims can go on these crazy adventures that lead them into tombs and such. They can also steal precious artifacts so they won’t be taken care of properly and future generations will not understand past cultures and humans and therefore will be doomed to make similar mistakes or just being rock stupid in general. /historymajor
I actually found these little quests quite fucking tedious. Maybe I’m just lazy (80% possibility), but it’s not like Fallout 3 or Borderlands where you just point the analogue stick/mouse while holding down WASD to get through one area. You have to click around each maze to keep the sims from killing themselves.
Like Jimbob McGee here. First time he was going through a tomb in China I was like, “Oh, he’s probably smart enough not to walk through fucking fire.” When the Grim Reaper showed up to take away the now toasty Jimbob, I realized I was putting too much faith in the programming. Sorry, Jimbob. Again though, tons of clicking. And if you want more than one person to go through a tomb, expect even more.
The visa system is an interesting new twist, though. All sims start off with a level 1 visa for each location, and must acquire points through adventuring in order to gain a higher visa level. On visa level 1, they can only spend three days on location before getting booted into a loading screen regardless of what they were previously doing. Because I’ve been playing an epic amount of Red Faction:Guerrilla and I’m now back at school, I haven’t managed to get anyone past level 1 yet. I’m also not trying very hard, so there’s that.
Sims can also enjoy the new hobbies photography and martial arts. Martial arts is hilarious because they start off fighting with the sissiest half-hearted slapping you’ve ever seen. Photography is sort of silly because the challenges are pretty weird. One of them is to take a picture of a tissue box. Yeah.
With every expansion, of course, there’s new shit to pimp your sims out with. Such as this hairstyle, and this eyeliner that looks like an earthquake hit in the middle of the application process.
Seriously, what the fuck.
There isn’t a ton of new shit, which is understandable given that there are basically 3 more neighborhoods instead. In general, it’s a few new Create-A-Sim shit like hair and clothing (men are once again largely overlooked unless you want like 12 new hats), as well as some nice Chinese, French, and Egyptian styled furniture and decor. There’s also a totally bitching moped that made me giggle furiously. Other than that, gameplay back in the normal neighborhood is pretty much untouched.
Of course, because this is EAxis we’re talking about, there’s some pretty gnarly bugs in this expansion. The biggest one is the fact that the launcher refuses to install a bunch of custom content, even if it’s content from the Sims Store. That’s right, if you were willing to pay money for some little pixel furniture, guess what? You can’t even use it unless you use some insane fix that involves converting files or sacrificing to Odin or something ludicrous. Great job, EAxis! Further, I personally have had weird shit like sims not going to school or work and therefore performance slips to ridiculously bad levels, an issue that I’ve only been able to solve by using the Awesomemod’s “backtowork” command at 9 AM, 3 PM, and 8 PM. That or just letting everyone fail and then sitting back and laughing, but usually I actually want to play the game as they meant for it to be played. Another weird glitch is that sometimes inventory objects will just vanish. Shit sucks if it’s an adventuring item that you need in order to get more visa points. I never thought I would ever actually say “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU…” in real life, but I did that day.
Honestly I don’t understand EAxis’ bug fixing policy. Some of the issues people have been having have been around since the base game. Half the bugs EAxis doesn’t fix are fixed by fan-made mods like the Awesomemod. I understand the economy sucks and they may not want to hire a whole bunch of testers, but if some regular guy can fix this shit for free and do it within a couple of days, what’s EAxis doing?
I feel like I rant about EAxis every time, but sweet Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game this buggy that doesn’t get a patch within a few days. Hell, wasn’t Modern Warfare 2 patched like the day after it was released because there were issues with multiplayer? Infinity Ward, go help EAxis or something. Damn.
Anyway. It’s hard for me to recommend this expansion pack, but I feel like that’s probably because of who I am. Currently I’m having a ton of fun beating dudes with a sledgehammer in Red Faction. World Adventures, by comparison, is kinda boring. If you enjoyed the other “journey to another land” expansion packs of Sims 1 and 2, you’ll probably enjoy this one. It’s a good expansion, but I wouldn’t have used it as the first one. I think they should’ve done something like Nightlife/Hot Date and mix up everyday gameplay a bit. Again though, I study ancient Greece so my opinion is moot, really.
Final verdict: meh. Hold your money until a patch is released.
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