As someone who’s never had much trouble resisting the charms of The Sims, I approached The Sims 3’s latest expansion pack with some apprehension. But I was surprised—and delighted—to discover that The Sims 3: Pets ($39.99 for Mac and PC) extends Electronic Arts’ popular franchise in a direction it has never before dared venture: straight into your heart. The series’ previous games also added four-legged friends, but they weren’t as rich, colorful, or fun as they are this time around. There’s not enough in this expensive add-on to completely soften the hardest of Sims detractors’ hearts, but what’s here is more than sufficient to make this aging PC game worth a look again.

Two things set The Sims 3: Pets apart from its predecessors, The Sims: Unleashed and The Sims 2: Pets. First is that the new animals are treated as exactly what they are in real life: potentially meaningful, but ultimately supplemental, additions to the household. Don’t expect to pack Fluffy in a car and send her out to earn her keep this time. They can do some things, such as sniff around for treasure, but they essentially behave within the same restrictive boundaries they do in our world—and can be as varied in their outlooks and persnickety with their likes and dislikes.

Pets With Personality
This means that assigning your pet personality traits has real-world consequences, just as it does for the human family members, and that Rover will develop goals he’ll be as intent on achieving as his owners. Sure, they may be simpler—climb up on the couch and watch TV, be taken for a walk, that sort of thing—but they’re legitimate nonetheless, and give all the pets real character. You’ve always been able to create a pet that looks exactly the way you want it to, and with dozens of breeds of each type available (well over a hundred for dogs alone!), as well as the ability to create your own from scratch, you have more options than ever. But now their distinctiveness is much more than only fur deep.

That’s a good thing, too, because for the first time you can actually play your pets, and set them on the road to achieving their dreams. The difference this makes is astonishing, and lets you feel truly invested in who they are and what their relationship is with their owner. As you experience the symbiotic give-and-take between human and animal, with Fido needing to be fed and in turn cheering up the sad woman who brings him his food, you form a real bond. It’s one that, for me, at least, has never easily established itself in dealings with other human Sims, who seem more like automatons than vivid non-player characters. But when you’re in complete control you don’t want to let either side down. It really does capture the thrill and responsibility of what it’s like to own a pet, and the graphics are so outstanding and characterful you may have to remind yourself sometimes that these pets are only virtual.

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Equine Excitement
The second enormous change introduced in The Sims 3: Pets is one of the pet types: horses. The developers have introduced a lot of fascinating content for them, such as riding contests that let you rake in cartloads of Simoleons. But being able to establish enough trust with your horse that he’ll let you saddle him up and trot (or gallop) him around town, before you return him home to his personal stable and salt lick is very much its own reward. Watching your steed grow in capabilities and confidence, too, is involving in a way pet rearing hasn’t been in previous games. And the new objects and structures you can build for your horse, along with the spacious properties and buildings designed to accommodate it in the new Appaloosa Plains neighborhood, really make owning a horse feel like a rare, special event.

No matter how many of what kind of pet you choose—any Sim family can contain up to six—you have lots of different ways of playing with it. You may treat it as your trusted companion, and enjoy spending time with it; you can train it to make you money; or you can buff it up, breed it, and sell it. The choice is yours, and having this much freedom over the way you interact with your pets is one of the nicest features about it.

Is it Worth Expanding?
Despite all this, it’s worth remembering that what you’re getting here is ultimately an expansion pack, no different than the likes of Ambitions or World Adventures. Most of what goes on in The Sims 3 doesn’t change much, so if you’ve never really grooved on the game’s basic mechanics or underlying ideas, don’t expect to become a convert now that you can add a Golden Retriever, an Abyssinian, or a Lipizzaner to the family. Because the structural game-play experience changes so little, The Sims 3: Pets also seems a bit on the pricey side, at $40. There are plenty of other new games you can buy for the same amount of money, and they don’t require you to own another product just so they’ll work.

If you’re a die-hard fan, of course, that won’t matter—and it shouldn’t. What does matter is that The Sims 3: Pets offers lots of new opportunities for exploration and evolution, and presents them in ways that are clever, well integrated, and even (at times) moving. If you’re already an animal lover, you won’t need to be convinced of the basic charms these new Sims versions possess. And if you’re not an animal lover, The Sims 3: Pets might just be good enough to turn you into one.

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