The Sims Medieval - PC/Mac

The Sims Medieval is great fun. I don't know how it compares to the other traditional Sims games. I am a big fan ofSims City Societies though and can tell you that the game play is similar enough that if you like one you will probably like the other. If you enjoy strategy, action or RPG games andare into the Medieval period thang then Sims Medieval will be a pretty good fit. This game is a very well thought out one and I do recommend it, but with caution.Here is a just a sample of the Good:Graphics: Beautiful. Though there will be moments of frustration when the oh so beautifully rendered trees and landscaping block your view, it is all rich with color and detail.Gameplay: Varied, challenging, entertaining. You will play a series of games. Each game is targeted to a specific ambition. Each ambition requires you to complete differentquests. The quests are varied and totally up to you. During the course of each quest you will be required to fulfill certain daily responsilities or "duties". Completingthese daily tasks are not always easy and can have good or bad consequences to your current quest. During each quest you are given a certain amount of quest points. How youchoose to spend your time in your kingdom will dictate how much of these points are used up by the time you have completed the quest. Use your time wisely and you can explorethe kingdom and build friendships, alliances, businesses, even families. (Though a note here, have more than 3 kids and you will be asked to send one of them away to school, etc.)You will also be expected to actually feed, clothe and maintain your sims (No joke, neglect the hunger or energy bar? Lose a sim. Serious.). And for not much money either, soyou will have to get creative.Game Designers were careful to include a number of keyboard shortcuts so navigating your kingdom is a snap.You will be expected to "build" your kingdom and are awarded a certain number of resource points according to gameplay results and allowed to choose which buildings can be actualized.There are unexpected elements of gameplay that are non-required but can make for a more well rounded Sim. Your sim can spend time playing KingBall for instance.This game is a fun way to explore the Medieval world without having to actually go medieval. If you like Renaissance festivals you should love this game.Sim Creator: Put your sim together yourself. You are given an avatar and a plethora of choices, skin color, age, weight, hair, body type, etc. You can even be a Medieval fashiondesigner if you wish. There are clothing choices for each class of sim and you are able to choose colors, etc. Plan an outfit: In the middle of game play stop by a dresser or chestand you can change your outfit or even someone else's (NPCs usually).Furnish mode: Think Medieval Interior Decorator.The music: Fantastic, the music totally fits the period and has a certain amount of tongue in cheek-iness to boot.Okay, now for the bad and the ugly.Glitches. Oh my God, how this game glitches. For instance, your character gets nabbed by the constable and sent to the stocks. Okay. Usually they are out in a day. But sometimes, they don't get out. Ever. Oryou see your sim desperately needs to eat. She has food, you get her to ye olde fireplace but her focus is low and she actually forgets what she is doing. And won't cook. At all. And dies. Sometimes you can save the game with a number 2 attached to it and close and go back in and finish up sometimes, you're just screwed.Also, this game was NOT designed for Win 7. Period. And don't bother contacting EA/Origin.(Which brings us to the truly ugly.) There is NO customer service or tech help for this game. EA/Origin will tell you there is. They lie. There is a phone number with many extensions and no humans. They have a couple of different websites and forums. These are also not maintained. Send as many emails as you please, there will be no response.Bottom line, this game is great fun but it is not for the faint of heart. You better have a real good system and a whole lot of patience because the powers that be are not interested in helping you out once you pay for the game. I'm not gonna lie, I have vowed to never, ever buy another EA game. That said however, I loved this game and the price that goHastings is offering it for is waaayyyy better than what I originally paid. So good in fact, I am buying one for my daughter too!NOTE: In the spirit of full disclosure, my pc is state of the art and now every time I play the game Windows Explorer crashes. My daughter just started playing hers on her laptop and it started crashing and freezing right from the beginning. Apparently EA is fully aware of the problems with this game (like how the longer you play the worse the gameplay will get, i.e. more and more crashes) but has done little more than issue statements basically blaming consumers' computers. They continue to release games that are simply not finished or at all ready for the user. This game is fun but woefully produced and should have been recalled ages ago. Go to (...).page to get an idea of what other users are saying.

As a history buff and Sims enthusiast, I was super-excited to get my hands on this game. I was looking forward to classic Sims gameplay, more or less, in a historical setting. When I learned there would be some significant differences in the way the game worked - that it would be more quest-oriented than life-oriented - I kept an open mind. I didn't so much mind not being able to build; that was never my favorite part of the game anyway. I was especially disappointed to learn that Sims wouldn't experience the full life cycle, but they didn't in "The Sims" (the original) either, and I still managed to enjoy that game very much."The Sims Medieval" plays like a civilization-builder crossed with a simple interactive novel, with a Simmish twist. Collecting resources, enlarging your village, expanding your territory, and enriching your kingdom are ongoing themes, but the "story" unfolds in a series of "quests," and in fact, you MUST be playing a quest to be able to interact with your playable Sims. If you enjoyed "The Sims Stories" series, which I did, you'll enjoy the quests, which play out in a sequence of simple instructions you can follow more or less at your leisure. There isn't anything tricky about any of the quests I've done so far; they really feel more like the unfolding of a story than the solving of a puzzle. When you're not working on your next quest task, you can spend some time focusing on your Sim's daily responsibilities (often related to his or her profession - the king writes laws or listens to petitions, the bard entertains, etc.) or socializing with other Sims.The social aspects of the game do leave much to be desired. There's a whole town's worth of people with authentic medieval professions and names, but there's nothing medieval about the social structure of the kingdom. Fellow Sims are as likely to walk up to the Monarch and tell him a dirty joke as they are to bow before him. As always in the world of the Sims, there's no such thing as gender differences, beyond the fact that women can have babies and men can't. There's something refreshing about a vision of the Middle Ages where all professions are open to both genders and same-sex couples can lawfully wed, but realistic it's not. (Of course, if you want a greater degree of realism in your game, you can simply choose or create only male Hero Sims, and have them pursue women. Of course, by the same token, you could create a kingdom - er, queendom - of Amazonian lesbians. The possibilities are endless.) Your Sim can marry any of the townspeople, but married NPCs don't become playable characters, and they don't have the same needs as your playable Sims - depending on whom you have your Sim marry, you may or may not ever see your Sim's spouse asleep in bed, for example.I know the game designers wanted the look of the game to have a medieval-art feel, but the graphics merely look poorly rendered: not stylized enough to capture a truly historic feel, while not sharp and detailed enough to look realistic. The camera angles are problematic; I was rarely able to zoom in on events that I really wanted to watch, and the interiors of buildings are like a dollhouse, only viewable from one perspective. If your Sim is having a conversation with his back turned toward you, there's no way to rotate the camera so you can see what's going on.There's no way "The Sims Medieval" is going to supplant "The Sims 3" or even "The Sims 2" in my affection - but it's certainly a game I'll be more than happy to take out and play every once in a while. (I also can't help but think this will make a good introduction to simming for the man in my life, who shares my love of history but is more drawn to a good sword-and-sorcery yarn than the drama of everyday life.) It's not a "sandbox game," but there's enough variety in it that I can't see it ever becoming unduly repetitious; even if you play the same quest more than once, it may work out a totally different way depending on which Hero Sim you select as the principal character as well as the decisions you make as events unfold.Don't expect "The Sims 3" in medieval garb. Expect a game with a few similarities, but much more goal- and story-oriented. If that sounds good to you, you'll find "The Sims Medieval" well worth your time and money.

I love this game I have and have logged many hours paying it.There are I believe 70 different quest you can complete. Which ones you can select depends upon who you choose for your monarch and what traits you give him or her. This means even after you have completed all the quests with your one monarch, you can play the game over again with a different monarch and get a completely different outcome. There are lots of side achievements too which give you extra things to do if you ever get board of regular game play. I will say If you are a fan of: The Sims 3, this game might take some getting used to. As it runs slower and you don't get as much time to free play or you risk poor quest performance. Also unlike Sims 3 you don't have the option to take down the walls of your house/ castle to look inside all the time, this can get a little annoying but I've read there is a game cheat for this.All and all I think this game is great and worth buying especially if your enjoy roleplaying type computer games like The Sims. Oh I would definitely recommend you also purchase:Sims Medieval: Prima Official Game Guide by Catherine BrowneIt gives tons of info not found in the regular game booklet, and makes it a lot easier to be successful with your game quests.There is also a website I came across that shares a lot of helpful tips and tricks for choosing good traits for different Sims and advice on quests you might be struggling on it is [...]Happy gaming everyone!

The game arrived in excellent condition and works perfectly, but the gameplay itself is lacking in some ways. You can only play as one sim as a time, children are npcs and don't age, and create-a-sim mode isn't nearly as detailed. But it's a fun game nonetheless, just don't expect it to be on the same level as the regular sims games. The medieval setting is fun to explore and good for some laughs.

Huge Sims Fan! Fun game but can get boring. You cant play it for hours and hours on end like the other Sims games but its fun to change things up every once in a while

I'm LOVING the game couldn't stop playing for a week and some lol

wife had bought this online to replace one she had damaged. was a hard to find game because it was only a special edition. was what we wanted.