As possibly the last real expansion for the Sims 2 franchise, it maintains the level of previous expansions.
Admittedly, they all have had their flaws, and it's hard to judge a stuff pack as 'good' or 'bad' based on the fact that it is just a bunch of stuff, but compare our position to where we were now with the original Sims, and things have come a long way.
The final expansion for The Sims, was Makin' Magic, and it stank. After running out of plausible ideas, EA finally just cut with reality altogether and turned your sims into potion-brewing whacks, whilst at the same time crowbarred in some of the ideas and characters that would have to wait until expansions of The Sims 2 before finally finding their true niche.
FreeTime, however, is an expansion that doesn't add as much new content as previous expansions, but instead takes many of the elements introduced over the past six expansions, and ties them together, polishes them up or generally expands on them in some way. One of the big new tweaks is the lifetime aspiration meter. This is a third bar shoehorned into the dwindling space that was at first only occupied by the aspiration meter, but then shared by University's influence meter. It basically fills up slowly over the course of a sim's life if they are generally leading a satisfying life, with those big lifetime markers (graduating college, the first love, maxing out a career or the skills) cause big leaps in filling up the bar. At set intervals on the bar, once passed, your sim gain a point to spend in the lifetime aspiration rewards panel. This panel has four sets of benefits, each containing four levels (reminiscent of Open For Business's rewards) - Motives, Work, Primary Aspiration and the new Secondary Aspiration. the motives rewards focus on reducing the rate at which your motives decay, allowing you to spend more time having fun and less time filling up those little bars, while work gives you rewards like ensuring an 80% success rate with career chance cards, increased vacation time and even the ability to plead for your job back after being fired. Rewards linked to your primary aspiration include the ability to summon aliens to impregnate your male knowledge sims at will, all manner of relationship-boosting rewards for your romance sims, or a jump in salary and the ability to offer financial advice for cash for your fortune-loving sims. Sometimes when inspiration lacked, the developers have simply padded out the rewards with more motive-slowing buffs, but generally you can add some handy new tricks to your sims' now overflowing pie menus.
The fourth column allows you to choose a secondary aspiration, which allow them to share the lifetime aspiration rewards and many of the wants and fears of a second aspiration. While many would see this as a final desperate bid to add something to the game, I prefer to take the positive view, that it in fact adds a little more diversity and depth to your sims. Before, romance sims were mindless WooHooing machines, fearing commitment and just looking for that next love. Now, you can have a romance sim who also craves to get a promotion, or a bookish knowledge sim who occasionally would like to go wild and throw a party. Some mixtures do cause quite comical and paradoxical wants. The romance/family sim can sometimes be scared to death of getting engaged to one sim, but want to marry them. Or the fortune/pleasure sim who wants to earn §100, but at the same time doesn't want to go to work. These are not so much bugs, but happy accidents that nudge the sims even closer to how a real person acts and feels.
Bugs, however, are as much a feature of the Sims 2 as expansion packs, but a dutiful patching process has made them somewhat bearable so far. In FreeTime, two examples demonstrate the scale - both large and small - on which bugs can occur. One the small side, the silver glow around the lifetime aspiration rewards button doesn't disappear now until you have exited that panel and reentered it. On the other end of the scale, the rate at which sims often learn new talents (the highly successful feature of Open for Business that's been added to by FreeTime, and Seasons before it) can often be so slow that it takes a sim days of obsessive sewing, fishing, plate-making etc before any talent badges are rewarded. The new talents, linked to the sewing machine and potter's wheel, are most affected, but other talents do take markedly longer to build now.
The main bulk of the expansion pack, however, is the hobbies section. A new sub-panel in the Simology panel shows that your sim has the chance to gain enthusiasm in a rather generous eight hobbies, and the good thing is that many of the activities your sim has been doing ever since the base game now contribute to enthusiasm in one hobby or another. Preparing and eating food now gains you cuisine enthusiasm; catching butterflies builds your nature enthusiasm, while watching the TV or reading a book increases your film and literature enthusiasm. The system is implemented well, meaning that many hobbies don't need that much special attention to build up, although sport, science and tinkering hobbies are less likely to touch on everyday activities.
All this enthusiasm gains your sims some nifty new interactions and abilities. You can talk to other sims about your hobbies, read about them in the newspaper or specialist magazines, blog about them on the internet and at it's highest level, taking part in a particular hobby will get you 'in the zone' whereby your motives will slow in their decay as long as you are taking part in that hobby, allowing you to enjoy it for even longer. Hobby-specific rewards include joining book clubs, going for hikes and serving platters of nibbles to entertain guests. Once you reach the halfway mark in your enthusiasm for any hobby, you will also be able to join the relevant secret society, which through means of a membership card, grants you access to their secret lot where everything you need to further your enthusiasm is at your fingertips, including like-minded sims. You can even gain membership cards as rewards to those career chance cards.
Talking about careers, there are five new ones available to you in FreeTime, each one linked to one or more of the hobbies, although why someone working their way up the dancer career doesn't gain enthusiasm for music and dance from it I don't know. You can now also turn your sims into entertainers, architects, oceanographers and intelligence agents, each with one of those handy career rewards - unfortunately, all the really handy career rewards seem to have been used up already (the cosmetic surgeon from University's celebrity career was a must for turning those ugly townies into something a little easier on the eye), but there is something immensely pleasing about having an architect sim who can draw up blueprints on his own drawing table.
The plethora of new objects is, this time, much more eclectic and random than many other expansions. Instead of new matching furniture sets, we have the exercise bike, the remote control helicopter, the ant farm, and decorative items that compliment your sims' various new interests, in particular a huge amount of sports-related items to create the perfect den. Peculiarly, a complete new set of matching kitchen appliances come with FreeTime, which seems odd when you consider that even more appliances will be coming our way when the Kitchen and Bathroom stuff pack arrives next month. Some objects also include new ways of interacting with them, in particular the old car, the train set and the food contest table. The car and train set are objects that you need to build yourself - with the car, you need to restore it from a rusty heap of junk into a shining, purring mean machine that can then be used like any other car. The train set can be used as-is, but also gives you the options to add items such as mountains, water, trees and towns to the barren landscape. The food contest table is also part of the new contest feature, where your sim goes head-to-head against several others to find out who can cook better. You can also enter dance competitions and gaming competitions. Considering that this is very well the last expansion for The Sims 2, adding such innovative objects and interactions to the game at this late stage could be a clue as to just what to expect from the third iteration.
Another clue, much less subtle, is in the form of a free computer the enigmatic Mr Humble presents every household (just where does he get the money?). The computer itself looks like the one from the Teen Style Stuff pack, but is in fact a unique object, containing a new game you can play... The Sims 3. Taking a look at the screen shows you what could possibly be some footage of the next game in the series, showing - most notably - seamless neighbourhoods and independently designable shoes (only Sims fans can get so excited about things like this). You can also play the game on any TV using the game console, to improve the resolution, but the images are still fairly low quality. They do bear a strong resemblance to the Sims 2, so time will tell just how generous EA have been with regards to a sneak peek.
So, in conclusion, FreeTime is a decent expansion, that adds not only an extra dimension to your sims with a secondary aspiration, but imbues many of the mundane tasks you've been doing to keep your sims happy with some further meaning, injecting a little bit of life into cooking pancakes or running on the treadmill. It's good to see that EA have managed to maintain a level of quality with their expansion packs that, despite their huge number, have managed to avoid spiralling into desperate, laughable cash-ins like its predecessor.