You’ll have to take several short, expensive three day vacations in order to ensure Visa points sufficient to take longer five and seven day vacations. You’ll find precious few hours to explore and adventure if there was a way to take a “vacation” from some of the more boring aspects of the Sims, this expansion would be much more appealing. You’ll initially only be able to stay for three days, which is a terribly short journey considering you’ll still have to eat, sleep, shower and do all of the other annoying little things you need to keep your Sim happy. So why go on all this adventuring? Well, for some reason the governments of Egypt, France, and China only grant longer visas to people who have earned Visa points by running these cruel little errands and have desecrated enough tombs. Don’t get me started about trying to find the tent salesman.

Even worse was the mission where I had to find a small red assassin bug that kept disappearing from both views. This didn’t work towards completing my adventure, so instead I had to look around the map (pixel hunt, really) until I found some areas I could excavate. I had to find two old relics and so thought of buying them at the store. But some don’t, and the difference is immense. Most adventure missions have goals that appear in the worldview map that lets you figure where you have to go next. There are other strange oversights in the game that make it more frustrating than it should be. The small yellow directional indicator that appears during this movement interface needs to be overhauled. I wanted to move a large statue to the left in order for it to cover the block I needed, but routinely the Sim was only given the object of moving it the opposite directions of where I wanted to go. The “moving an object” puzzle is common too, but not easily executed thanks to some awkward controls. You’ll have to dig through bones to get a key, or swim into a pool to obtain it, or stand on a certain panel to unlock a door-pretty standard stuff.

Still, the dungeons are pretty generic looking, are often tiny, and don’t provide much in the way of challenge. I’m sure there are people already out there who are creating Dungeons and Dragons maps using these tools. The dungeons are far from scary and are only rarely dangerous, but the customization and ability to create clever puzzles puts the tools on par with some fantasy RPGs. Going into the crypt was fun the first time and really shows off the tools that have been created to build a fully interactive world. My Sim and his girlfriend (he’s thinking of asking her to marry him but is having trouble getting beyond her criminal past) traveled to Shang Simla, a vaguely racist sounding name where every major Chinese landmark is twenty minutes away.

Sims 3 custom vacations worlds