Well all you simmers they are back! Vampires! We have had the opportunity to play and review this new game pack thanks to EA.

The first thing I did when opening the game was to look around the new neighborhood, Forgotten Hollow.

It’s not a large neighborhood, but it’s creepy. Definitely creepy. There are some new harvestables including Wolf’s Bane, Wild Sixam Mosquito Trap, and Plasma Fruit from trees. Yes they have brought back Plasma Fruit. They also added mosquitoes. As I looked around the neighborhood I noticed at least 2 vampire families living there. The Primo Vampire is count Vladislaus Straud the IV.

I was curious as to how CAS looked with our new vampires so using testing cheats I opened Vladis up in CAS. I was wowed by the fact that each of the vampire sims has a duo look. You can add a darkform that they will change into when feeding. More about feeding in a bit I wanted to give you a peek at what our Vlad looks like.

After looking around his basement, which was really creepy, I decided to have a go at building a vampire. Now what I found was a lot of new CAS items for building your vampire from teeth to ears to some creepy facial details like eye sockets, brows, and arch types. Now you can add a dark form to your new vampire or you can make his dark form the same as his normal form, as usual EA leaves that to you. As you can see from the pictures of dear Vlad he has a really scary dark form.

 There are a couple of new vampire aspirations as well. Under Knowledge you can becaome a master Vampire or Family you can have a vampire family. There is also one under popularity for you to be a "good Vampire" which means you would like to remain as human as possible.

There is a lot of new vampire like items and objects for you to decorate your own basement (or house depending) and this does in fact include coffins and spider webs. One of the neat things they added was decals for the walls to make them look like they were pealing (Why didn’t I think of that).

 They also added hanging garlic for your non vampire sims to keep the vamps away. Vampires are very uncomfortable with garlic and have to get away from it. The garlic actually fumes. If you want to keep the vampires away then hang garlic.

They can woohoo in the coffin and when they do I find it hilarious. The coffin floats and has smoke, bats and hearts flowing from within. When they are done the coffin spits them out. You have got to see it! They can also try for a baby. If both are vampires they will have a vampire baby that seems to look normal in the beginning.

Becoming a vampire involves training like any other skill in sims. But you can’t just buy books to train, you have to start by training from another vampire. There will be an interaction that allows you to be trained by a higher level vampire which isn’t really hard because the neighborhood has a few. Once you train you will then get the interaction to learn vampire lore on the computer and buy vampire tomes which help you to learn the art of vampirism. Reading the tomes unlocks things like the plasma pack, making a plasma drink and so on. If you don’t want to go around sucking your neighbors necks then learn the tomes. In the beginning I could only get plasma from my neighbors necks, I couldn’t figure out any other way. Maybe you will! However you do level up fairly quickly if you read the tomes, which brings me to leveling as a vampire.(Notice the neato new plumbob)

There are new “Vampire Powers” that you obtain by earning vampire points, which is where the tomes came in. The more points you get and with each level you can earn a perk of your choice. Like turning others into vampires, or mesmerizing the mere human, or walking in to anyone house uninvited. But beware, for every so many perks you have to take a negative hit like not being in the sun long, sleeping only in a coffin, or hissing uncontrollably in public.

To turn your neighbor into a vampire you have to earn that in your vampire power points. You must choose that as an option when you have enough points. I did and turned one of my neighbors into a vampire. The human becomes very uncomfortable during the 3 or so sim days it takes for them to turn. Once they turn they do a quick dark form transfer and quickly correct themselves.

Vampires have vampire energy that enables them to do some of their powers. Depending on how complex their action is it uses this vampire energy up. Standing in the sun also uses it quite quickly and quicker if you took the negative hit option. There are 2 ways to replenish this. One is hibernating. The other is to do a dark meditation. Both examples are below:

 One of the funniest thing I found is after they “compel” a victim for a deep drink the victim passes out on the floor. Beware if you do this in a public place you get a lot of negative moodlets all around you. Like vamps of old it’s best to stalk the victim and find them alone if you can.

I think the most fun I had was earning the right to be a bat. You can fly as a bat anyplace you wish within any neighborhood in the game. It was great to watch and they even have smoke and such when they take off and land just like you would expect.

I played this game for 2 days straight and I barely touched the surface of what they have added. I look forward to playing some more to unlock all the wonders this game pack has to offer. I have to say this game pack is turning out to be a lot of fun. Have fun with this!

Sul Sul

TheNumbersWoman