Installation is easy if you’re adding Unleashed to an existing Sims installation. If you have purchased additional expansions at the same time, be sure to install them in the order they were released – a particularly annoying Sims quirk that I wish they would fix.

Graphically, this is the same old game with the addition of some new models. It’s starting to look dated and blocky, but I don’t expect an expansion to improve the game engine. We’ll have to wait for Sims 2 to see a better looking game. Some nice new soundtracks and pet-related sound effects were added as well.

To adopt a pet, you visit the new Old Town area of your Sims neighborhood. To get there, you take a neighborhood trolley from your house. There are various stores and entertainment in Old Town, as well as the pet store when you can adopt your new friend. If you want a non-interactive pet, you can adopt a fish or a bird, but cats and dogs are the main attraction. Once you adopt Fluffy or Tiger, they take up one of the 8 slots in your family. So, the old cat lady will have to make do with 7 cats.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Old Town, although it looked very nice. It should have been the same downtown area that was added to Hot Date, so that if they ever made neighborhoods connectable there would be one central downtown. There are stores to browse and stuff you can buy, and you can build on and design each lot. However, there’s not enough that you can customize, in my opinion. I also wish you could have a career path so that a Sim could be working in Old Town when another Sim was shopping, and then they would interact. The Pet Show is fun, though, especially if you can train your dog well enough to win.

Once you have a pet, they sort of roam around Old Town with you, and I was always afraid they would get lost. The other thing is a pet peeve of mine – the game pace. It always takes so long to do everything in the Sim universe. It shouldn’t take ALL DAY to take a trolley to a shopping center, adopt a cat, and go back home, but it does.

As you find out once you’re a pet owner, there are already animals in your neighborhood. Some of them are strays and others are pets, but they are all ill-behaved. They come into your house, eat your pet’s food, use your lawn as a toilet, and generally make you miserable. What’s worse, they can befriend your pet and keep coming around. Come to think of it, they’re no worse than your Sim neighbors.

You can interact with your cat or dog by playing with it or training it. Pets have personalities like human Sims, so smart pets are easier to train, and more social pets like interacting with humans and other pets. Generally, though, they mind their own business and remind you when they are hungry or want attention. You can order other members of the household to take care of the pet, too.

Another feature of Unleashed that wasn’t heavily advertised is the improved gardening ability. Instead of the flowers and shrubs that you always hired a gardener to care for, you can now grow crops on your lot. If you produce vegetables, you can use them for food or sell them in Old Town. It’s great to have a way to support your Sims without forcing them to follow a career path. If that doesn’t interest you, there are 5 more career paths to choose from, but they work the same way as the originals.

When playing with the garden, you’ll soon find yourself overrun with rabbits unless you take certain precautions. The only thing that works to keep rabbits away is to have a pet cat, which is really dumb. A dog will do more to keep a rabbit away than a cat will, although I suppose either would work in a pinch. Cats can prove their hunting prowess in other ways, too, such as having a little bird snack. Oh, and you can tell your dog to attack your neighbors, which I suppose is one way to combat the ones who wander by all the time.

I wish that EA had focused more on fixing the existing problems than on releasing more content that magnifies those problems. Since pets are based on the same AI as humans, they have many of the same issues, such as the freeloaders who stay around and eat your food all the time. Also, humans are still subject to pathing problems which are worse when there are more objects in their way, such as animals and food bowls. I also can’t believe that they took the time to design a pets expansion yet ignored how people and animals interact in the real world. I don’t know very many people who let their cats and dogs roam free in their neighborhood for a number of reasons, including the fact that it’s illegal in many communities. There should have been more of an emphasis on pet carriers, fenced yards, and leashes. Then there is the fact that your pets can, at least in theory, mate and produce even more balls of fur. While none of my pets have ever managed to do so, it’s not a good thing to promote. As Bob Barker likes to say, “Have your pet spayed or neutered.”

Still, adding pets to The Sims was a good thing. Many people, like me, can’t imagine life without furry friends underfoot. It got me to play the Sims again after growing bored with the repetition. Gardening is a nice extra feature, which will hopefully allow us to start moving away from the sanitized Simburbia and get some real life in the game. Despite the annoyances, The Sims: Unleashed livens up the game. If you’re already fed up with The Sims’ quirks, you may not find a lot here to bring you back, but Unleashed is a great addition to the Sims saga.