The Sims 3: Supernatural

The Sims 3: Supernatural Review

Not super or natural, just bad.

The Sims 3: Supernatural Review Image
As you can probably tell by the title, the theme for The Sims 3: Supernatural, the latest Sims 3 expansion, is spooky stuff that goes “bump” in the night. The Sims 3 has always had its share of strange denizens, from mummies introduced in World Adventures to vampires in Late Night, but now fairies, werewolves, and zombies are added to the mix. Throw in a dash of magic, and the virtual neighborhood is starting to resemble a regurgitated Harry Potter fanfic mixed with heavy doses of crazy.

Supernatural starts with the obvious expansion stuff: new decorations, new clothes, new hairstyles, and so on. There’s nothing earth-shattering there. There is a single new career track, so you can have your Sims employed as a fortune teller along one of two branches: a legitimate all-knowing seer, or a scam artist who uses charming and manipulative words to win promotions. The career is one of the old-school “rabbit hole” types, so your Sim will disappear from the world while he’s at work. There is some off-the-clock work to be done through special social interactions, but nothing even close to the depth of the professions introduced in Ambitions. It’s just as arbitrary as and no more exciting than making your Sim become a doctor or a cop.

The main draws of Supernatural are the new playable “races” of werewolves and fairies. Any human Sim can turn into either race with a little luck and some fetch questing. Each race grants special powers and abilities for the Sim’s social life. Becoming a fairy allows you to play “fairy tricks” on your friends to increase relationship points, while channeling your lycanthropy lets you become the alpha of your werewolf pack and hunt for rare resources.

As with most additions to the Sims universe, the new races and their powers are presented cleanly and streamline with the rest of the game. However, every addition to the engine is a repetition of an addition from a previous expansion pack (or even the base game!). Do you really need to personally hunt for ores and gems if you raised a dog to do so with Pets? Or if you’ve saved up the Lifetime Reward Points to buy a Collectable Detector to just spot them on the map, a reward that shipped with the base game?

The new magic system suffers the same problems. Sure, the spells are neat, and the idea of practicing magic to learn more powerful spells appeals to a grinder mentality. Yet many of the spells and effects are simply alternate inputs to produce the same output: why bother crafting a love potion or casting a love charm spell when you can go on a date? An early spell allows you to quickly cure another Sim of his hunger, hygiene, or bladder needs, but those are quickly rendered irrelevant by inexpensive Lifetime Rewards or better household objects, and ultimately the spells don’t save a lot of time. A couple spells stand out, such as the Toadification Curse, which causes the target to take on the comical shape of a cartoonish frog that looks like it was spawned in Kermit’s nightmares, but even that is merely cosmetic with very little effect on gameplay.Not helping matters is the structure of the spell casting system. Your magically inclined Sims have role-playing game-like mana bars that deplete as they cast spells, and recover through inactivity, sleep, or using the “Broom Arena.” Casting spells is also easy to understand, just a simple social command like just about every other command in the game. But magic is not a “skill,” so you never know what kind of progress you’re making on it, and you don’t know how many spells are possible for your Sim without a guide. Most of the early spells have limited usefulness, so some players may not have the patience to sit and watch their Sims wave their wands randomly in the air for simulated days at a time just for the hope of a good spell. Even worse, Sims can’t pass down their knowledge to the next generation, so all the work you put in teaching a Sim his spells can be instantly taken away with a sudden death.

If you think that none of the preceding sounds like a standard Sims expansion, you’re not alone. This is the first Sims expansion for any of the base games that has strayed so far from what makes The Sims a unique franchise. Sure, magic existed with the final expansion for the original game (The Sims: Makin’ Magic), but the supernatural aspects were more limited, and didn’t create a neighborhood full of unnecessary mystical distractions. The best expansions of the Sims series have augmented your Sims’ virtual lives, not displaced them. Granted, the draw of ordering your Sims to pee and shower in time to catch the carpool can get old, but the new systems in Supernatural don’t add variety to the neighborhood so much as they add shortcuts or just nullify established systems.

In fact, some systems are downright malicious. The addition of zombies can cause serious damage to your landscaping, and it’s not fun to spend chunks of money protecting your well-tended garden: this isn’t Resident Evil. With default options, zombies tend to appear in packs at the same rate your plants grow, so it shuts down farming entirely as a career path that you might want to pursue. While magically inclined Sims don’t do drive-by spell casting, the new races can use specific commands to interrupt your Sim’s activities even on their home lot. You have to babysit your Sims at all times just to make sure they don’t get distracted, which can be a little much with large families.

As of this writing, if you save your game at night during a full moon phase, zombies can permanently over-spawn and appear every night, completely shutting down not just farming and gardening, but your ability to have any healthy plants at all. Worse still, EA says this bug is permanent to a corrupted save file. Even when the patch comes out to address it, any neighborhood that has had a zombie spawn that was saved during a full moon will be overrun, and you’ll need to start a new neighborhood to get around it. It’s good to know EA is working on the problem, but the seriousness of a bug that can screw up your hard work without any possibility to fix it cannot be overstated. Be sure to backup your saves before installing the expansion.At least EA understands how chaotic the game has become. New options in the main menu allow you to enact “population controls” to prevent the game spawning in new fairies, ghosts, or whatever else you may have due to other expansions. Allowing all creatures to inhabit your neighborhood will mean your vanilla humans are in the minority, creating a neighborhood not rife with variety and intrigue, but with chaos. Population controls are saved per-neighborhood, so if you enjoy the silliness, you can always create a new neighborhood (especially with the new Moonlight Falls map) with all the populations active, while your classic neighborhoods can remain as you left them. Regardless of the options, you can manually convert Sims to the other races if you go through the quests, so you are always in control. It’s a nice touch, and certainly helps keep your neighborhood as focused as you wish it to be. Also, when creating Sims, you have the option of just outright making the creature you wish, thereby allowing you to get into the new content right away instead of jumping through hoops.

Even if you like the chaos, however, it comes with a price. For the last few expansions, The Sims 3 has started having more and more problems from a technical standpoint, but the problem absolutely explodes with Supernatural. The game runs so many AI routines and has to load so many objects that RAM issues are common. Save files can be corrupted from being too large, and long sessions can result in the infamous “Save Error 12” which translates to “Everything you’ve done since your last save is lost forever, and you can’t fix it.” Task-switching or even having programs open in the background can result in crashes or memory leaks if you have less than 8 GB of RAM. The game is playable with 4 GB, but I still recommend saving every 20 minutes or so, and restarting the game every hour or two. It’s not so bad if you have only a couple expansions installed, but with the full suite of games (and especially if you also have all seven Stuff Packs installed as well), your poor rig is going to chug trying to run it.

Throughout my entire playthrough with The Sims 3: Supernatural, as I explored every facet of the new Sim types and magic system, one question was on my mind: is any of this really necessary? The premise is enjoyable, and variety is usually a good thing, but EA went a little overboard. If you need to disable some of the new content in order to make the game playable, why bother with it at all?


Supernatural doesn’t augment your Sims or make the neighborhood more interesting: it turns it into an unrecognizable mess that doesn’t even come close to resembling the “life simulator” it’s supposed to be. If this is your first and only expansion pack, it might be interesting and worth the purchase. However, if you have any other expansion installed or are happy with the way your neighborhoods already are, avoid it.

In This Article

The Sims 3: Supernatural

The Sims 3: Supernatural

The Sims 3 Supernatural gives players the new ability to create werewolves, fairies, witches and more intriguing vampires directly in the Create A Sim tool.
Franchises:The Sims
Genres:Simulation, DLC / Expansion
Crude Humor, Sexual Themes, Violence
Platforms:Macintosh, PC
Developers:The Sims Studio
Publishers:Electronic Arts
Release Date:September 4, 2012
The Sims 3: Supernatural Review
The Sims 3: Supernatural Review
Forget The Sims 3 Supernatural, wait to see if The Sims 3 Seasons is better.

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