Pared down for the mobile format, The Sims 3 is notably bereft of many of the trademark Maxis witticisms at its loading screen

The Sims is unlike any other game brand in existence. While most find success by focusing on delivering a fun, exciting experience, The Sims excels not by being fun — which it typically isn’t — but from its uncanny ability to be fascinating on a humanistic level.

Like most of Will Wright’s games (SimCity, Spore, etc.), The Sims eschews the traditional need for linear progression through a series of tasks in a static game world. Instead, players are given an impressive set of tools to create characters, objects and environments and watch as life unfolds. It’s a formula for resounding commercial and critical success, and it still works as well as it did twenty years ago. But almost all of Wright’s games were built for computers, which carry with them the expectation of a greater commitment of time and effort on the part of the player.

Adapting The Sims to the iPhone, then, was no easy feat from a technological or a design standpoint. On iPhone, The Sims 3 is an impressive example of shrinking a massive game down to phone-size proportions without losing most of the elements that gave the series its clout: the requisite customizable characters, charming set pieces and robust decision-making aspects are all retained from its flagship PC release. But it is the very fact that so much from the original release was crammed into such a minuscule and difficult interface that makes The Sims 3 almost impossible to recommend.

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