Sims 3 head for the future

The latest expansion for the Sims 3 – Into the Future – allows players to transport their family to the future and set up their houses like a scene from the Jetsons. ZOE HAWKINS takes a deeper look into the game.

The latest expansion for the Sims 3 – Into the Future – allows players to transport their family to the future and set up their houses like a scene from the Jetsons. ZOE HAWKINS takes a deeper look into the game For their final Sims 3 expansion, your Sims family is transported to the future. Much like The Jetsons, this futuristic world is filled with bots, awesome technology, and the same human emotions we are familiar with. Without any need to race off at 88 mph, your Sims can time travel and even cause paradoxes.

As the name would suggest, Into the Future is all about taking your Sims forward in time. When you start up your household, a strange portal will appear and Emit Relevart, a time traveler, will emerge. After you complete a quick and easy task for him, you can jump through the portal and explore the future.

Upon arrival in the future, you take up a new home at a weird community center where other time travelers and people of the future come and go as they please. It’s fully decorated with all kinds of high tech features including a shower that uses wave technology to clean your Sim in half the time, or a fridge that makes synthesized food to keep your Sim full for longer.

You are given an Almanac of Time, with which you can find your descendants in the future. Depending on the life you have led in the present, you may have a large, successful legacy, or not. In fact, using time travel, you can cause paradoxes that cause your descendants to die. I have to wonder what my Sims got up to when I wasn’t around my ‚”child-hating‚” Sim somehow managed to have a descendant: what accident did he get up to? Particularly strange considering his girlfriend had four descendants.

Into the Future introduces three new skills: Laser-Rhythem-a-Con instrument skill, Advanced Tech Skill and Bot Building Skill. Advanced Tech is a fairly passive skill it simply allows the Sims to use future-tech objects without failure. Yes, my one Sim was so un-tech savvy that she fell out of the future elevator. Every time. However, with time, she learned to fly around with her Jetpack without any horrifying accidents. Bot Building is by far the most interesting new skill. Upon gaining Bot Building skill, your Sims can design Plumbots and even enter their bots in competitions yup, you can make battle bots. Sims can create trait chips for their Plumbots and combine them in ways destined for disaster what did you think would happen when you gave the Robonanny the Sinister Circuits? Plumbots can even form relationships with your Sims. However, despite being able to make out, they are unable to have children together. Time to wave a circuit flag for robot rights!

Using your Almanac of Time, you can trigger different types of future events. This will either allow you to keep the future as normal, or move it towards a dystopian or utopian state. In the dystopia future, meteors often strike the world, probably because you used the giant magnet to attract them in the first place. In the utopian existence, the world is lush and colorful as Sims walk around joyfully. Honestly, I didn’t see much of a difference with these changes I was expecting a much more dilapidated future in my dystopia.

While it is interesting to watch your descendants improve their lot in life as you progress through your career path, the final reward can only come if you are immortalized in a statue. That’s right, there are five options for ‚”legacy statues‚”: The Lustrous Entertainer, The Pioneer of Plumbotics, The Renowned Philathropist, The Time Keeper and The Trendsetter. I’m not quite sure why they needed a fashion based statue reward considering that the others are actually focused on the future technology, but I suppose that is the nature of the Sims. Not only will these statues give the Sim an enormous amount of lifetime happiness points, it also means that future Sims applaud that Sim when they’re traveling around in the future.

If you’re a fan of leaving your normal home and job for all kinds of Sims adventures, this expansion may just be up your alley. With enough of a connection to your existing Sim’s life, you can explore a completely new area, become friendly with your descendants or even cause a dystopian future. I just wish there could have been more variety with the future rather than having a set world that’s hundreds of years in the future, it would be nice to choose if I wanted to travel to the near or far future. That said, it was fun convincing present day Sims that the sky was falling nothing quite like belonging to a Doomsday cult.

* Article courtesy of Lazygamer