At its core, The Sims began as a sort of real-time strategy game where one managed people and lives rather than cities or empires. Since then, the game has evolved, changed shape a bit and become an open ended, community-driven experience that has been defined with its own genre: Life Simulation. This third edition in the series takes the successful formula that has endured for years and expands upon it splendidly without losing a sense of familiarity and connection to the original titles that is essential in any sequel. With limitless gameplay options and presentation values that allow you to truly connect to the world around your sim, The Sims 3 is the best the franchise has offered so far, and should appeal to both casual and hardcore fans alike.

The starting point of every game in The Sims 3 is the "create a sim" mode. This is where you will mold your virtual human being into just about any individual you can imagine. The decisions you make here will affect the entirety of your experience, and the options for creativity and customization are almost infinite. In terms of physical appearance, you can choose from a wide array of hair styles, eyebrow shapes, makeup, and even eyelash length. New to this version of The Sims is the ability to not just choose whether your sim is fat or thin, but adjust body size along a slider, and then supplement that with choosing muscularity as well. The option to adjust height or the dimensions of specific body parts is still missing, and as such, the variety of body types still remains a bit small when you get out into the neighborhood.

Even the smaller, inexpensive homes are designed with attention to detail and intelligent layout.

Once your appearance is set - which can be done in minutes or hours depending on how precise you wish to be - it is time to clothe your virtual character and give it a personality. At first glance, it appears as though there are fewer clothing options available to you than in previous versions of The Sims, but the new create-a-style option gives you the ability to customize any article of clothing with your choice in color, fabric type, and pattern, making the options seem limitless. You can then match colors and patterns of furniture and wall coverings as well. This makes it very easy to create well matching outfits and can leave a fashion-conscious player occupied for quite some time.

Next, you will assign traits to your sim, which is one of the most important parts of the start-up process. Each adult gets five traits, children start with three and teenagers have four so that you can define their personalities through the way you play. The fun comes in the variety of options and effect that those options have on your gameplay experience. A sim who is good can brighten up other sim's days, will want to donate to charity, and naturally clash with evil sims. An athletic sim gets boosts to his/her workout skills. There are over fifty traits to choose from, and the ability to create a truly unique individual is rewarding. The five traits chosen for your sim will dictate their lifetime wish options, and from those, you will choose one to promise your sim. Once you choose a favorite food, music, and color, you are then off in search of a home.

The game comes with one built-in neighborhood, Sunset Valley. This urban locale is filled with modern homes and plenty of places for your sim to go for a night out on the town. There is a second neighborhood, Riverview, available as a free download from Ths Sims 3 community site. This town is much more rural than Sunset Valley, but both neighborhoods offer the same core amenities, with variations on how the rest of the space is embellished. The choice is really a matter of preference, and both spots are a great place to build a life. If you are eager to get your sim off to work and into the social scene, then you can buy a pre-furnished home with the starter cash given to you. There are many beautiful lots available, and even the inexpensive starter homes are attractive. However, with build and buy modes that are so well done, you would be missing out if you don't spend a significant amount of time there.

To put it simply, you can create almost any home that you can imagine in the Sims 3. From spacious mansions to humble ranchers, every building can be made attractive and enjoyable to live in. Not only are the wall building, foundation, landscaping and garden tools filled with diverse options, the controls for using them have been streamlined to make the process more accessible. Creating rooms has never been easier, and landscaping your property with a fishing pond, pool, and garden is a breeze. It is not only these large scale factors that make creating a stunning home interesting, the small details are present too. Everything from toilet paper dispensers to towel racks to kitchen cabinets are available to add small touches to your furnishings and give your space a very comfortable, real feel. Stones, boulders, bushes and flower beds will all do wonders for your yard. Anybody with the slightest interest in architecture, landscaping or interior design can find hours of enjoyment with only one lot, and endless fun with the mode as a whole.

Once you're settled in your home, it's time to get started in life. There are so many things to do in The Sims 3 that there is almost no way to accomplish them all in a single lifetime. Between fishing, gardening, painting, and writing, a sim can make a living without even getting a real job. These hobbies can be developed into money making factories, and when your sim has mastered any of these skills, he/she can make enough to live comfortably. If you do want a job (which is where the real money is), you are in luck, because the actual workplace elements of the daily grind have been notably improved. Rather than just going to work and coming home, your sim is given options throughout the day on whether to work hard, suck up to your boss, hang out with co-workers, goof off, or even build skills while at work. The specifics of what you can do vary from job to job and can be as simple as sucking up to a superior officer for military-minded sims, or as fun as playing golf all day for great surgeons in the medical field. The trick is to not get too caught up in the entertainment to be had at work, as slacking off too much will affect your job performance.

The quality graphics engine allows this love scene to be accented by a romantic backdrop.

As if the various things you can do between work and hobbies was not enough, the new social scheme in The Sims 3 allows you to engage with other sims in a complex, fun way. For example, a sim with a good sense of humor can crack jokes, tell stories, make funny faces or employ one of many other humorous diversions, but if the audience consists of a sim with no sense of humor, then he/she will become irritated and there may even be a fight on the horizon. The need to actually pay close attention to the responses of other sims and use them to discover personality traits and ways to get close to an individual makes the building of relationships a fun and interesting part of the game.

If you have time among the many things to do while playing, you may notice that The Sims 3 looks great. Because the entire neighborhood is now easily accessible without loading screens, one can see other homes from the backyard and enjoy ocean views or sunsets over the mountains. This major improvement from previous iterations in the series will quickly catch your eye, but there are also many small, subtle graphical improvements like the character models of the sims themselves. Shading and anti-aliasing are both accomplished very well, and sims no longer look jagged or puffy as they often did in The Sims 2. Facial features flow naturally, even if they are a bit odd looking by design, and this smoothness makes a huge difference in making sims appear more realistic. This same small touch goes for furniture and other household items as well. The sound is not as solid as the graphics, but it is as good as it needs to be. The background music shifts with important moments in the game, and sound effects are ample. The Simlish language spoken by your virtual creations is well realized, and overall, the audio is nicely integrated into the game.

The greatest achievement in The Sims 3 comes not in its gameplay or presentation. Instead, the overall package makes it stand out as a great sequel. The customization options within the game are accessible to anyone, and the open neighborhood creates a genuine sense of community, as characters age and grow alongside your sim. These two factors alone will provide months of enjoyment to just about anybody, and the well-realized gameplay and presentation only serve to sweeten the pot. The only real drawback is that you have to pay real money for all of the downloadable content on the EA Store. That said, charging for downloads has become standard fare in today's gaming world, and EA does at least offer the Community Exchange, where users can offer custom items free of charge. Improving on a good formula while retaining a connection to the original is one of the hardest things for a sequel to accomplish, and indeed, that challenge is why so many second and third entries fail. The Sims 3 does exactly what a great sequel is supposed to, and serves to expand the already outstanding pedigree of the Sims series.