The Sims™ 3

Call me a madman, but once you get the ball rolling this is an immaculate steam deck title. Never in my life would I think I'd pay for this game on steam with the abysmal pricing even on sale, but here I am, and I gotta say life is quite nice without the EA Play/Origin launcher.

It's a good game... when you manage to run it! Thankfully community made a very thorough guide on Steam guide page that covers tons of bugs and fixes. It's unfortunate but as usual with older Sims games, Sims 3 has tons of issues that require patching. Personally, I'd say so far I find it less buggy than Sims 2?

I still consider The Sims™ 3 to be the best game in the series. I take long breaks but occasionally come back and spend many hours having fun.

The sims franchise is only as prominant as it is due to its creative premise and excellent marketing while I enjoy the more creative aspects of it you cant ignore the excessive loading times, the glitches and how overpriced it is for its age

Okay, so this game is by far my favorite sims game (as evidenced by my play time over the past 8 years lol) but with the Island Paradise expansion pack, it becomes very laggy.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT.

It makes the game pretty unplayable. Otherwise, it's great! Every other expansion works just fine.

A classic. The DLC is a little much even on sale for how old it is (You shouldn't need to spend nearly $200 with all DLC on 50% sale for a game released in 2009) but the experience is great and still holds up relatively well today

I bought The Sims 3 for my ex. She loved the series, and I thought this would be the perfect game for her. I still remember watching her play, getting lost in the world of virtual lives, creating stories, and designing houses with so much excitement. But that excitement didn’t last long.

She told me that The Sims 3 felt a bit empty without the expansions. The base game was fun, but it lacked the depth and variety that The Sims 2 (which I had bought with all the DLCs) had. In the end, she went back to The Sims 2, and The Sims 3 became more of a passing moment rather than a lasting favorite.

Still, every time I see The Sims 3, I can’t help but think of her—the way she laughed when her Sims did something ridiculous, how she meticulously decorated every house, and how, for a brief time, this game was a part of our story.

Even if the game didn’t stay with her, the memory of it stayed with me.

fun to play, buiding is fun and you get to be creative its relaxing

This game seems to be intentionally bricked. Does not work without a bizarre and inconsistent amount of fiddling.

I love playing this game so much more than sims 4. There's so much more life and character in this one that truly gives it a unique feel. The only problem is saving the game; you have to either pause or just stop Onedrive syncing while playing. I'm not the only one with this problem as it seems to affect a lot of other people in their reviews; this issue needs to be fixed, but I don't see that happening anytime soon since this has been happening for a while.

I wanted to play the game again for nostalgia's sake, but it never ended up working. I wasn't able to actually play it, and it never synced up to my EA account. I don't know if it's just aged and now it's outdated, but I was super disappointed. If you can get the game to work, it's absolutely fantastic, but for some reason, it didn't run properly for me.

I love this game. I think I spend the most time building and furnishing houses, but the gameplay is also so much fun. There are an incredible amount of things to do, and you can always find something new to focus on if you start to run out. Create a style (CAS) is by far the best cure for when you need to do something creative. Love it!

The Sims 3, like The Sims 2 and The Sims, is a life simulator. The difficulty has been toned down from The Sims 2, but I don't find that it detracts from the experience. I've thought about it a lot, and The Sims 3 is really somewhat of a missing link between the boring, pointless but fancy gameplay of The Sims 4 and the Sim City/excel spreadsheet gameplay of The Sims.

Mods like Nraas Overwatch and Nraas Error Trapper as well as simple stuff such as limiting the game's max fps to the refresh rate of your monitor really help the game as well. The game is sort of unstable without mods with frequent stuttering and the occasional Sims 3 crash.

ALWAYS REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR GAMEPLAY EVERY NOW AND THEN
(or download a mod that reminds you to save haha)

great when it works, but for the steam version on windows 10/11 you have to open it in task manager and disable all your GPU cores except 0, then launch, then enable them again. They patched the EA store version but the Steam version still involves this pain in the ass step. When it works it's great. FIX THIS

Excellent game even after all these years. Stability issues aside, this is incredibly engrossing and packed with features that will last you a long time. The price point is a bit steep at around £20, but it's still worth picking up in my opinion.

I absolutely love this, sims 4 was my only sims game i'd play before but I enjoy this one a whole bunch more.

Even today, The Sims 3 remains a highly enjoyable game. While it may have its quirks, installing a few mods can significantly enhance its performance, resulting in an amazing experience.

I really wish they would make Sims 5, but I know they're making some fornite ass battlepass sims game that's suppose to also work on Mobile, just make a good game Maxis and we'll buy it. Stop scamming your audience for Microsoft or get fired anyway. Stop listening to your elites, they dont care about what could make the industry better. Also yeah, sims 3 doesn't work anymore because they're trying to figure out how to scam their playerbase again.

better than the sims 4, the details are so cute. EA needs to bring back this level of attention to detail.

the game gets stuck in the launcher, i open it and click play but it never actually opened. if anyone can help ill rebuy the game but as of right now it really sucks

The sims 3 is honestly the best sims game out there as of the time i costed this review. The DLC's are worth it too. I have a few of them and want more of them. Still to this day in 2025 i love the sims 3.

After many beloved hours I have played this game in my I decided to play this game again. But now, in our lords year of 2025, the game cannot even be started without some fiddling of letting firewall through or logging in or something, however. I cannot be bothered. Negative review because; Just let people play the game they bought.

First there were issues with launching the game to begin with, then through the community I found a workaround to make it launch. Then there were more issues getting the game to save, then still more issues being able to re-open the save files so that I didn't have to start over from the beginning each time I opened the game. Eventually using all of the weird little "hacks" to get the game to actually run on a modern PC stopped being worth it. It's a shame, because I remember loving the CD-Rom version of this game way back in the day, and was really looking forward to revisiting it. But in it's current form, it just doesn't run as intended.

its hard to play on windows eleven , had to check on forums how to play it on my laptops and now my saved games aren't findable due to one drive i guess.

EA should be sued...The game downloaded and launched fine but after finishing the tutorial it won't let me save. Even after restarting it the household save file became corrupt I suppose. EA needs to be held accountable for selling these broken games that makes US do the fixing...

yeah its good but is a pain in the ass to get to run smoothly and even with every community mod/fix it still has intense stutters and lag spikes constantly. if this game was properly fixed to run on modern software then it would be worth it but for now its borderline unplayable for lots of people

Requires far too much modding to be able to get started playing, and also it's buggy.

this just straight doesn't run well and is a pain to get it to be even remotely playable

i can't believe this is still up for sale. 20 dollars for a game that doesn't even work anymore and fails to save the 2nd time you play. screw you ea.

I was finally able to get it working by disabling OneDrive for my Documents folder. Great game, but EA is still awful.

bought this game and didnt even really get the chance to play it. it refuses to load up properly and each time i would try i would have to fix the launcher by using the task manager. STEAM REFUSES TO GIVE ME A REFUND EVEN THO THE GAME IS BROKEN AND THOSE FEW HOURS I SPENT ON IT WERE TRYING TO GET IT TO LOAD!!!

Sims 3 is the epiphany of all sims games. As I've played since kindergarten, this is exactly how I dreamed the game would be one day, and that's mostly just the open world part and adventuring. Other aspects could improve ofc, like with most EA games.

Better than the Sims 4

Game is clearly built for outdated hardware, expect to download mods to make it run more smoothly on newer hardware. Many Steam Guides are available to help with that.
Still pricey after all these years, I suggest waiting for sales as the game + dlc often drop 50%. Most of the DLC is miles better than the Sims 4. 5x Sims 4 packs encompassing expansions, game packs, stuff packs, and kits could equal one Sims 3 expansion pack.

The Katy Perry DLC may look garbage, but it has Katy Perry singing her songs in Simlish. I am not joking.

Abandonware. Don't buy it unless you are prepared to do a lot of research and troubleshooting just to get it to run

I think this is the best Sims game in terms of freedom. I've got very nostalgic memories of playing Sims 2 but I go back to playing it after playing this and constantly find myself going "wait, you can't do x?! Well, that sucks". I'd recommend Sims 3 to anyone who hasn't played a Sims game before, it's great. I just wish there was a (reasonably priced) complete edition so that I could have all of the DLC, but that's never going to happen. It's just the model that The Sims runs on.

With the open world and decently robust base game, this is objectively the best in Sims franchise, but please, for the love of Bella Goth, do not buy it on Steam. It wont work on newer computer set ups, even with workarounds and Steam's answer to pleas for help are giving very "suddenly I can't read"

Tired of Sims 4 being a miserable excuse for a Sims game? Try this game out! The sensation can't be beat!

I want to recommend this game because I have been playing and loving it for years, BUT the ongoing issues are too much to ignore. It requires tricks and workarounds to get the game to run on newer PCs. My Steam version won't load anymore, no amount of task manager tricks or the Alder Lake patch will fix that. My free EA app works, and it's annoying. I'm not sure how EA is still actively selling a game that has such a big problem without any updates or fixes. Don't give them your money.

it doesn't run properly i couldn't save after 8 hours of gameplay and now I can't even start a new game

I've played a bit of this across EA's App and on Steam. It's a great game but I'm recommending against this because it doesn't work on Intel's 12th, 13th or 14th Gen CPUs without setting the process affinity to lock the game to one core.

EA have pushed a fix to the EA app version. Here's the kicker - they have no plans of releasing this same fix on the Steam version. Yet they're still clearly selling the game via Steam, as well as the DLC, with absolutely no disclaimers on the store page to inform users that it won't work out of the box.

I strongly disagree with this behaviour as they're misleading users.

I wanted to play all 4 sims games one after the other with a small family to compare the differences between the game play. However, the Sims3 is currently broken and will not launch after I hit play in the launcher menu. Each time I validate the files it says that there were 3 files missing and that they will be reacquired. This happens every single time I validate the files, there is something really wrong going on here.

I have restarted my pc, ran as administrator, and attempted to run in compatibility mode. If I need to run this game with a third party download for it to work, then EA should offer everyone refunds and stop selling this unless they manage to fix this like they did with the first two sim games.

THIS GAME DOES NOT WORK ON NEWER COMPUTERS even ones that a 4 - 5 years oid probably won't either. THEY NEED TO RELEASE THIS GAME FOR NOW.

This game simply does not work on modern hardware or windows 11. It is an incredible game but EA must be held accountable for continuing to sell an unplayable game

I played it for three hours one day and when I went to get on it the next it kept giving me errors that I can't load my games and when I try to make a new game It doesn't let me. The EA community doesn't give anything useful to fix this problem and i've tried multiple ways that people say help fix it but none of them work. This was a huge waste of money considering I spent $40 on a DLC for a game that doesn't even work. I understand that it's 2025 now and updates have stopped being made to the game but the fact that EA doesn't have anything that can help this problem is very disappointing.

steam version just doesn't launch anymore like.. at all. you have to download other things to get the game to work which is just plain stupid. but of course this game gets neglected

It's fun, but old. Has severe stuttering issues and crashes. Perfect unmodded with just a very small handful of DLCs.
Factoring in everything from the Sims store (only visible in game) and all steam-visible DLC, it is a total of 74,486.50 USD.

its fuckin awesome the best sims game there is no word of a lie

Disregarding all of the jankiness, The Sims 3 is, in my opinion, the best game in the franchise. It was way ahead of its time. I am doing the lepacy challenge, and even with just the base game, I had tonnes of fun, and I'm having even more fun with the expansion packs.

If you're tired of The Sims 4 or want something different from The Sims 2 while keeping the latter's charm, try this game out. It needs some TLC to play in 2025, but it's a great life simulator game at its core.

Buy it only if it's on sale, though.

This game lagged so much. It was stuck in the background, or wouldn't shut off completely. By the time I was finally able to get off the game, it was 4 hours later. I only played 20 minutes of the game. I told support about my issue but because of their rule about not exceeding 2 hours I couldn't get a refund. Highly upset!!

i was excited to play just to see it still does not work through steam even though the game just got updated

I still like almost everything about 3 better: the creation options, the jobs and opportunities, it feels more customizeable despite 4 trying more to support modding, the in-game customization is just more enjoyable for me and I just like it better all around