Genre: Simulation
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Maxis
Release Date: February 28, 2006

With the new expansion pack The Sims 2: Open for Business, Maxis lets your Sims create and maintain their own businesses. The new business mode is not the only improvement, as there are also over 125 new items.

In this expansion, having a successful shop is all about pleasing the customer – the customer is king. . While your business is open, you can gain positive or negative ratings; you gain a positive rating when someone has a good experiences (being successfully wowed by a salesman or having a good conversation) and bad ratings can be gained rather easily, especially if two rivals decide to shop in your store at the same time. With so much resting on the emotions of your customers, leveling up your store can be more about making strong relationships instead of a good sales pitch.

Whenever you gain enough customer loyalty via shoppers having good experiences, your business will level up, and you gain a point that can be spent on your business perks. These perks follow in five basic paths: connections (gain multiple friends by talking to one sim), perceptions (you to see what item the customer might want to buy), cash (instant addition to your cashflow), wholesale (buying inventory becomes increasingly inexpensive), and motivation (augment your workers' skills). These perks are extremely valuable while doing the hectic job of running your own business.

Aside from these perks, there are also skills that your Sim can get better at, such as restocking or toy making. Whenever either your Sim or an employee keeps working at a certain job, they will gain a badge after a certain amount of time. These badges allow them to unlock better items to manufacture or to better perform their jobs. A salesperson with a golden sales badge is much more likely to dazzle a customer into buying something, and a Sim using the flower-crafting machine can only produce the snapdragon bouquet with a golden flower-making badge.

Employees are another cornerstone of your business, as they help to pick up the slack. Hiring them is a fairly easy affair, but managing them is anything but. You can use the telephone to call up a list of prospective employees, complete with their stats and badge list. If you want an employee who has all of the golden badges, however, it will cost you a lot.

The employee can be called in at any time, and you can observe his condition by the color of the colored circle above his head (green good, red bad). You can get them to work a lot longer if you give them frequent breaks and you have a decent break room where they can watch some television or grab a quick bite to eat. Whenever they reach a certain level of experience, you can even promote them to manager, which means you can go home and rake in the simoleans. The only problem is that your income will decay every day no matter what, so you have to visit the business eventually if you want to maintain a positive cash flow. You never have to worry about misbehaving employees, because you can fire them on the spot, if you wish.

In Open for Business, you can create just about any kind of business that comes to mind. Once you have a concept, you can start the business out of your own home, or you can buy a community lot with a quick phone call. My first business was run out of my home and dealt in the selling of garden gnomes. After I had a bit of progress there, I took over ownership of the grocery store in the business district. One interesting thing is that you can set the price of objects to whatever you would like. My strategy with the grocery store revolved around selling the products for dirt cheap so that the customers would be happy and rapidly increase my business level. When you sell off a business that has reached the maximum level of 10, you can make a huge profit just for the improvements to the business itself.

The new objects include the regular slew of new furniture and decorations, but there are also some rather impressive objects this time around. There are three crafting stations for flowers, toys, and robotics. Each of them has three badge levels that are attainable to unlock more creations that are powerful. The robot station, for instance, allows you to create robotic house cleaners, which will fetch you a pizza; a security bot; and, eventually, a fully controllable robot that becomes part of the family.

There are also some new items that deal solely with business, such as the cash register and the ticket machine. The cash register allows you to ring up purchases, whereas the ticket machine vends tickets to Sims if your business sells entertainment instead of goods, such as a bowling alley or a club. Also available in this expansion is the salon chair, which allows you to change the faces of other Sims for a nice chunk of change, and there is not much in life that compares to having a customer happy with a god-awful haircut. Another great addition is the elevator. Nevermore will your Sims have to use archaic stairs, but be warned, because the elevator has the tendency to break down quite a bit.

There are some problems, such as the frequency with which the cleaning robot malfunctioned. Also, keeping employees happy is harder than running the business itself. They constantly need breaks and entertainment while they're sucking dry your bank account with their hourly wages. The fact that you have to check in every few days so your business doesn't lose profit is also rather ridiculous. This makes owning a chain of restaurants, for example, almost impossible.

All of the changes brought about in The Sims 2: Open for Business helps to reinvigorate the game, and overall, the new expansion pack is a great deal. The sheer depth provided by owning your business can suck away many hours from your life, and it also gives the player a nice distraction when the regular life of the Sims becomes too monotonous.

Score: 8.4/10