The Sims: Unleashed looks and sounds about as good as you might expect it to. The Sims' graphical engine is definitely showing its age, and your sims themselves look as blocky as ever, though Unleashed's new character animations are just as amusing and expressive as those in the original game, especially when your sims play with their pets. Fortunately, The Sims sounds just as good as ever in Unleashed: The game has new music tracks that are uniformly good; the sims themselves still speak the same sort of expressive gibberish, or "simlish"; and the expansion's lyrics, which are also in simlish, and the new sound effects (for pets and for cooing, doting sims) all sound great.
You'll still have trouble getting everyone to do the same thing at the same time.
Unfortunately, like all of the previous expansion packs, Unleashed doesn't so much as bother to try to fix the core game's problems. As has been the case for the past two years, the in-game camera scrolls extremely sluggishly. And as usual, the game's pacing is still erratic. Unless you're content to leave your sims alone and watch them, you'll find yourself constantly pausing, speeding up, and slowing down the game to make sure that you can get your sims to do everything that you want them to and that all their needs are met. That's because just as before, an unhappy sim is generally a useless sim--if you want your sims (and your pets) to do anything interesting other than being miserable or dying outright, you need to constantly baby-sit them to make sure they've been fed, that they're entertained and well rested, and that they have easy access to a nearby bathroom. Constantly baby-sitting your sims in Unleashed can be even more frustrating because the expansion makes no attempt to fix The Sims' poor pathfinding, either. Unless they have wide-open spaces, your sims will still have an inordinate amount of trouble getting from point A to point B; they'll still occasionally stop and turn around in place repeatedly to talk to someone standing right next to them; and they'll still "forget" any orders you've queued up for them if they can't get past the chair that's in front of them. It's true that the Unleashed expansion pack never set out to fix The Sims' core problems--none of the other expansions did either--but after all this time, these minor problems seem at least as annoying as ever.
The worst thing about these problems is that they keep you from doing all the interesting new things you want to be doing in The Sims: Unleashed--playing with or training your pets, building up a garden, or taking your family out for a trip to town. You could say that expansion packs for The Sims have become formulaic--that they all add a great deal of new content without really fixing any of the original game's flaws--but if you're a fan of The Sims, you'll probably end up enjoying Unleashed as much as the previous expansions.
