The Sims 3: Barnacle Bay expansion review

Expansion packs for The Sims 3 tend to come in two varieties. The ones that contain the suffix “stuff,” such as Outdoor Living Stuff and Fast Lane Stuff, are mostly collections of new items and clothing to mess around with in your Sims 3 game. Non-“stuff” expansions, like Ambitions and Late Night, historically have added significant new gameplay features to the experience.


Above: Little Murray wants to go hunt for sunken diamonds, but the game won’t let him

But with Barnacle Bay, EA seems to be tossing that naming convention aside, and if you expect anything revolutionary you’re going to be disappointed. Even if you buy Barnacle Bay in a retail store, the expansion is a download – and not a very large one. For your $20 (or 2,000 Sim Points if you buy from the Sims Store) you’re getting just over 100 MB of content. This includes a new town (the titular Barnacle Bay) as well as over a dozen new items, some new outfits and new locations.

Barnacle Bay is all about the pirate theme, and for the most part it does that well. You can replace your house’s windows with portholes and put a barrel in your living room and pretend it’s full of grog. But what you can’t do is engage in pirate-y gameplay. You won’t suddenly get into swordfights in bars or take up a career of terrorizing the high seas. When making our own Threepwood family, we were dismayed to see that there was no Lifetime Wish option for “Become a mighty pirate,” nor could we adjust our Sims’ personalities to make them more pirate-like. All Barnacle Bay really offers is new aesthetics.

And aesthetics can only get you so far. The restaurant shaped like a wrecked pirate ship? Looks great – shame you can’t look inside it, though. And while Goldbeard’s Gym may have a great name, it contains the exact same treadmills and weight systems you can find in any other Sims 3 building. Honestly, seeing cool pirate items just makes it more frustrating that there’s no pirate gameplay to go with it.


Above: Cool looking restaurant, huh? Too bad it’s just a facade

Of course, Barnacle Bay offers a whole new town to start new families in, which could be pretty valuable to some players, especially if they’ve already filled up the other areas available to them. It’s nice that you aren’t merely expected to play with these pirate-themed items in neighborhoods in which their inclusion is completely foreign. Instead, you get an area in which they are only kind of foreign.

It’s not as if EA is charging more for this than they typically charge for new items, either. If you’re way into all things pirates, then you might find the cost worth it for the new design options alone. But if you’re a more casual Sims 3 player who is bored with the current gameplay offerings, Barnacle Bay will do absolutely nothing to entice you back.


Above: Fishing isn’t new, but Guybrush is excited about his little fish anyway

So it might be misleading for EA to omit the “stuff” prefix when putting this expansion on retail shelves, even though it contains a new town, but hardcore Sims fans may feel like they got their money’s worth anyway. Everyone else can probably pass on it, at least until the inevitable ninja expansion pack.

Mar 17, 2011

CATEGORIES
Latest in The Sims
inZOI Character Studio trailer screenshot showing a young woman with ginger-y hair and a light baseball cap smiling to the side
If you can't get enough of killing Sims in The Sims 4, iNZOI offers "16 different types of deaths" to inflict upon your poor unsuspecting Zois
A Sim draws a tattoo in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies cheats for small business success
A shop in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
How to start a small business in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
A Sim celebrates his tattoo shop in The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies
How to complete The Sims 4 Esteemed Entrepreneur aspiration in Businesses and Hobbies
Paralives
The Sims 4's colorful competitor Paralives is bringing one of my favorite features from The Sims 3 back – the ability to customize literally everything
inZOI Character Studio trailer showing a young woman with ginger-y long hair and a white baseball cap smiling, her hand against her chin
The Sims 4's hyper-realistic competitor inZOI will only "sort of" have sex – but I'm sure a Wicked Whims-style mod will take care of the rest
Latest in Features
The village green in Atomfall
My first 3 hours in Atomfall feel playing Fallout 3 for the first time, and if you don't check it out I'm legally obliged to bash you with a cricket bat
The Demon's Hand
League of Legends' take on Balatro is one of its best mini-games yet – and it's also exactly what's wrong with this era of League of Legends
Chris Evans in Avengers: Endgame
Avengers: Doomsday release date, cast, plot, and more news
Yasuke standing in front of a Kofun tomb in Assassin's Creed Shadows
It took me over 20 hours to unlock Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows, and a Kofun turned out to be the perfect training ground
Naoe kills a target with a black and white filter over the camera highlighting the red of blood spray in Assassin's Creed Shadows, with an On The Radar orange frame
Assassin's Creed Shadows "has a little bit of Tarantino flavor", but its real secret ingredient is intrigue: "It's almost like you're watching an episode of Shogun"
Helldivers 2 Borderline Justice Warbond helldiver using hoverpack to shoot down with hunting rifle
Talking points from the Game Developers Conference 2025 and how they could impact the future of gaming