Fancy your Sim owning
their own business, which you can actually see and run yourself? With Open
for Business, you can! From restaurants to beauty salons, electronic shops
to florists, your Sims can run virtually any type of business they want!
Hire staff then set them to work at the cash register, making toys,
crafting floral bouquets, manufacturing robots and more! Any Sims from teenager
to elder can be hired to work at a business, either by selecting them from a
(probably) random list, or by simply asking anyone who comes along. A Sim's
skills will determine how much they expect to be paid. Pay them too little, and
they'll expect more breaks, and may quit if they don't get them.
Each staff member has a coloured blob above their
head, signifying their happiness. Make sure you give them a break or
send them home if a blob goes red, or they may quit. If a member of
staff isn't needed anymore, you can lay them off. If they're not doing
their job properly, you can fire them.
Design your shop to
your own theme, layout, then specify the best prices.
Win the
Best-of-the-Best award to establish a great reputation for your Sim's business.
The higher the
skill, the higher the quality! Make sure your Sim is well skilled for making
goods for your store. If your Sim (or a member of your staff) has low skills
you'll find the quality of your goods will be much lower - they may even be
faulty!
Lifts (US English: Elevators) are finally available! No more
walking up stairs (unless you want to) at long last!
Open for business contains over 125 new objects, so you have no excuse to make sure your
business looks and works the best it can!
If you want the thrill of running your own business on The Sims
2, Open for Business is for you. It's a fantastic expansion,
probably the best to date, especially when combined with the
expansion that came out prior to this, Nightlife.
If you don’t have any desire to have your sims run their own
businesses, then Open for Business will not be your
cup of tea. Everyone else though will appreciate the entirely
new and extensive gameplay dynamic that it adds to The Sims 2.
Open for Business will require you to put aside the leisurely
pursuits of your Sims, roll up your sleeves and put in a hard
day’s work to succeed. But in gameplay and fun, this is the most
rewarding payday you’ll find in any Sims game.
If you want to turn your Sims 2 game into
a business management simulation with more details and
customization features than you can shake a stick at, then Open
For Business is for you.
There is just
enough realism in Open for Business to make this
challenging even for boring economic students, but it's
still a lot of fun for Sims fans that have come to know
and love the wacky characters and unpredictable
situations that you run into in The Sims universe.
Gameplay, as with all Sims expansions, is really
where this game stands out, the added objects and
interactions really deepen your playing experience
and give you even more options for how to play an
already staggeringly open-ended game. Overall, this
is a valuable expansion that will make your Sims
2 playing experience even more enjoyable.
Open for Business is a fun expansion to play, but it
will certainly be more fun for those Sims fans who
have been looking forward to creating customized
careers for their Sims or managing them at work.
The suite of activities that goes along with being
self-employed is well-varied and open-ended in the
true spirit of The Sims, and the lives of these
virtual people seem that much less abstract because
of it. Open for Business makes the already-addictive
formula of The Sims 2 that much more compelling, so
the game is almost a sure thing for established
fans.
The final verdict? It's a little sloppy in the implementation,
but overall a solid expansion to a great franchise. By itself
Open for Business may not be a must-have, but paired with
NightLife, the two packs together will probably add hundreds of
hours of gameplay to the series.
The economic model is robust enough to keep things interesting
and the complexities of running a business will keep players
hopping. If you don't yet own any expansion packs, University or
Nightlife would probably make a better choice, but for someone
who already has it all, Open for Business is going
to add hours of new play time to your favorite game.
This is the best expansion pack for The
Sims 2 yet. It opens up an entirely
new gameplay experience that will take over
the life of you and your Sim. Far from
a frivolous extra, Open for Business
delivers as much fresh gameplay as many
“complete” games.
This is probably my least favorite of the
expansions to this point. That's not saying
it's bad, it just takes more work than I
want to put into it. Now that The Sims has
gone beyond the need to tell sims to go to
the bathroom whenever they need to, I'm
forced to tell them to do all kinds of
things in a work environment. It can take a
long damn time to build talents up to
acceptable levels and while the reward is
pretty good (seeing the business flourish
and all), it's almost not enough to make me
want to do it again.
Amazingly it all still works via the
standard Sims interface, and the depth and
intricacies of the many commands (from
firing employees to forcing hard sells on
punters) are neither intimidating nor
confusing, and businesses range from piling
a load of old crap on a rickety table in the
back garden to the likes of multi-level
supermarkets and gyms. In short, even though
it feels so very wrong to say this, Open For
Business is a Sims expansion worth buying.
The game lacks the whimsical feel of playing
a "Sim God," but it definitely makes up for
it by bringing out your inner Donald Trump
in well-conceived entrepreneurial gameplay.
It's a tougher -- and leaner -- game than
its older expansion-pack siblings, but isn't
starting your own business all about being
the toughest and leanest?
The Sims 2 Open for Business is one of
the best expansion packs released for The
Sims yet. Letting your Sims have their own
businesses seems like a natural progression
and the business element is deep, it isn't
just a tacked on inclusion.
After The Sims 2 let people satisfy their
need to build up pointless little domestic
kingdoms, Open For Business helps stretch
the borders rather than just broadening the
comfort zones, which arguably makes it a
better expansion than most.
There's certainly sufficient new content in
the pack to keep dedicated Sims fans busy
for dozens of hours, and with the basic
appeal of the core game still undiminished,
you're left free to take the expansion
content as far as you want to: from running
a lemonade stall on your front lawn in your
pyjamas, to taking the retail world by storm
with your crack team of ninja robe clad
store attendants.
Thanks to
Metacritic for pointing me to these reviews
Back to Expansion
Packs
Fancy your Sim owning
their own business, which you can actually see and run yourself? With 
Win the
Best-of-the-Best award to establish a great reputation for your Sim's business.
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