Two days ahead of the launch of The Sims 3’s newest world, Roaring Heights, @SimGuruTatertot and @SimGuruBrett treated fans to a cheeky peek at the 1920s and 1930s inspired world. Bringing together art deco elements of New York, Chicago, and Miami in their heydays, it actually looks rather splendid.
Style and Substance
Art deco fans will go mad for this world. It includes a whole new array of art deco Build/Buy objects and Creat A Sim (CAS) fashions. Game designers have already been dabbling a lot with 1920s/1930s CAS fashions with the Fifth Avenue Fashions and Jazz Age packs, and a Bauhaus Build/Buy set, to name but a few purchasable add-ons. But from the looks of what’s available in Roaring Heights, it appears to have more scope to build you perfect art deco home AND town like never before. The new world includes period toppers for your skyscrapers and community buildings, curved building corners, neon lights, Bauhaus-style windows, art deco patterns to customise your objects with, to enable you to build that perfect Jazz Age paradise without having relying on custom content.
Making Cars and “Whoopee”
The Fixer-Upper car that comes with both the standard harks back to a similar item in The Sims 2: Free Time expansion. Buy piecing together bits of an old wreck, you can build your own car as well as your handiness skill. There’s also a level of customisation available to galvanise the activity, namely in being able to choose the exact colour of the paint work.
The car itself, once built, also includes new interactions that aren’t available with any other cars. Being a convertible, you can gaze at the stars with your lover, or even “Woo Hoo”! Woo Hoo-ing in cars is a much missed feature from The Sims 2 and its great to see it make a reappearance, although very late to the party. It’s such a shame that it looks like it will only be available for this particular vehicle.
Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollercoasters!
By buying the gold edition, you will also be given enough SimPoints to buy the new venue that is being released to compliment the world: The Boardwalk Venue. This will also include the ability to build rollercoasters!
Rollercoasters are not new to the franchise, making their first and, until now, only appearance in The Sims: Making Magic expansion pack for the original game. They were incredibly wacky and a lot of fun to play around with, and it looks like these will be very much in the same spirit. Specific set pieces, such as waterfall drops and chicanes can be assigned one of three themes; Haunted, Wonder, or Thriller. This changes the animations that go with the ride at that particular section of track.
But it was not made clear in the Twitch broadcast whether these rollercoasters will be available on only community lots, leaving players wondering if they can incorporate them into their homes. It would be odd that if rollercoaster parts didn’t appear on a residential Build/Buy screen as a default that they won’t be available in buydebug mode. So even if there’s no intended capacity, there most probably be a way around it.
Like Rollercoaster Tycoon (RCT) it appears that you will be able to create your own routes for your coaster using pre-made sections that snap together. However, RCT fans should probably stick to RCT if it’s realism they’re after as these are pretty zany and silly. But none the less, it’s really nice to see Maxis bring back another feature from previous games that players miss.
All That Jazz!
Overall, this looks like a well designed and dedicated addition to TS3 and looks amazing. In fact, we’d go as far to say that Roaring Heights will probably outshine the buggy and lacklustre result that The Sims 3: Into the Future was. It just goes to prove, that the oldies are indeed goodies.
The Sims 3 Roaring Heights world will be available to purchase direct from The Sims 3 Store from December 12th 2013.
