The Sims 2 FreeTime Review

What time is it? It’s Sims 2 expansion time. After all, it’s been about six months and Maxis/EA keeps riding that franchise by expanding the possibilities of the world’s (arguably) biggest single-player gaming franchise. The last outing, back in September 2007, addressed holiday time for the Sims with the Bon Voyage expansion. Now it is time to address what the sims do with spare time in the aptly named FreeTime expansion.

For those who may not know what the Sims 2 is, it is micro-managing at the ultimate level. You control the lives of characters in the game, from eating to sleeping to personal hygiene, as well as their social lives and professional careers. Kids have to be told to do homework and foster relationships with parents and others.

Expansions have included Night Life, University, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons and the aforementioned Bon Voyage. There are been additional content packs as well like Family Fun Stuff, H&M Fashion Stuff, Glamour Life Stuff, Holiday Fun Stuff … well, you get the idea.

Each expansion comes with it’s own problems (for the full rant, see the Bon Voyage story), which essentially means that any personalized or custom content has to be saved to a hard drive prior to installation of the new expansion and then moved back over into the files the game creates. Some content won’t work otherwise.

Ok, on to what FreeTime offers …

This expansion truly caters to spare time and expands that to include interactions with others based off that time. There are new activities that translate out to the new hobby meter. Sims indulge in a certain activity and the meter grows. If they maintain their enthusiasm and keep the meter up, they are visited by a representative from that particular hobby’s secret club and can visit secret lots. Friends and/or a family member can be invited to visit the secret club’s lot.

The breakdown for the clubs is music and dance, arts and crafts, sports, fitness, scientific, nature lovers, gaming, cuisine, tinkering, and, finally, film and literature. Each of the general areas breaks down into entertaining categories. Music and dance leads to ballet, violin, synthesizer and nursery rhymes; arts and crafts gives way to pottery, sewing, frames (for paintings), and an activity table; sports fans can practice soccer kicks, a football toss, or play basketball; fitness fiends will be able to jog, or ride a stationary bike; for the scientists there is an ant habitat and a telescope; nature lovers can collect bugs, bird watch or go hiking; gamers can partake in either video or board games; for the cuisine lovers there is a cooking competition, a nectar bar and serving platters of food; the tinkerer can tinker, control remote-control cars or helicopters, play with a model train or restore cars; and the film and literature fans can read, discuss books in a group, write a novel or watch a movie.

Now some of these elements were available before – players just didn’t benefit from doing them.

The expansion comes with five new careers – entertainer, dancer, architect, intelligence (start as a detective and work up to the head of the Sims CIA) and oceanographer. The expansion also has a new aspirations meter with secondary aspirations added. Sim parents can study parenting, there is a mysterious gypsy that will grant three wishes and as a Sim ages, they can designate three NPCs to age with them. Prior to the latter change, NPCs stayed at one age and generally when a playable character aged, they left friends behind.

Of course, the expansion does come with new clothes, but even better is the way that players can associate one neighborhood with another. In previous iterations, if you went on vocation,you had to return to your home neighborhood before you could go to another neighborhood (read that as an expansion neighborhood). With FreeTime, you can go from University directly to Nightlife, or a vacation spot to a university without the stop back home.

Ok, that is all great, but one of the best new elements is the ability to tinker with a neighborhood after it has been created. You can open the cheat console (control+shift+C) and type in “modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on” (no quote marks) and that allows you to raise or lower any terrain area. This will enable you to eliminate a mountain that is interfering with your town’s expansion.

It needs to be noted that the disc received for this was not the retail disc, but rather an advance burn. What that means is that there were some elements that were a tad annoying that might be corrected on the retail code. For example, at times the sims exhibited persistent and very stubborn free will in that they flat out refused to do what they were being told to do – like eat when their hunger meter was very, very, very low. Instead, they sat on the couch watching television and the instruction would appear and then drop from the queued screen.

The game’s controls are more or less the same, while the graphics engine is the same and the sound has had marginal additions.

What FreeTime offers is good stuff. The clubs are nice but the real benefit is linking neighborhoods and terrain modification. Rather than patch in stuff like this, Maxis packages the changes into an expansion. FreeTime is not a must-have, but it is a solid addition to the game’s overall scope.

Review Scoring Details for The Sims 2: FreeTime

Gameplay: 6.8
Free will seems to have been a bit of a problem with the disc received. This was not a retail, so maybe the dev team had some time to tweak it a bit, but with the disc received, a sim would be very hungry and refuse to get up off the couch to go it when told to.

Graphics: 6.5
A few additions in terms of new physical content, plus the hobby graphics, but this is the same engine and the game looks the same.

Sound: 6.5
Not much to write home about.

Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Concept: 7.0
There is some good stuff here, but it seems that with each expansion there is a teaser of what is possible and the game does not quite go far enough (as in, the logical advancement of something is done incrementally to leave content for another expansion). The whole concept of “FreeTime” could easily have been incorporated into Bon Voyage to create a more robust expansion that dealt with down time from work and such. Instead, it is broken into a couple of expansions.

Overall: 7.0
The ability to rework some of the terrain in existing neighborhoods is very nice, but it should go a little further. Still the game does offer something more than merely adding a new zone/neighborhood and that makes it a solid addendum to the Sims 2 franchise.