The Sims 4 Review

Swimming pools aren’t the only things that are missing

he moment it hits you is just before you start your first day at work. In our case it’s 9AM on a Tuesday, and we’re due in at the club to work eight hours of stand-up comedy. A couple of things happen that we aren’t expecting: we wake up automatically and set off for our job. When we get to the edge of the driveway, no car comes to pick us up, we just vanish. Now apparently at work, we can’t check on any panels relationships, Simology, not even basic needs. That moment of bafflement is a perfect distillation of how it feels to play The Sims 4.

They say you should judge a game based on what it does include, rather than what it doesn’t. Well, that positive philosophy might work for UcAS examiners, but not here. because it’s one thing to complain that the new game doesn’t come with all the functionality of The Sims 3 and its 4,000 expansions packs, and it’s another to notice that something as simple as a car coming to pick you up for work in the morning a mainstay in the series since the first game is now mysteriously absent too.

New beginnings

Apparently, eA maxis and The Sims Studio must have thought The Sims 3 was getting a bit unwieldy, because except for the new emotions system (more shortly) the other notable change is in the way you control the game the UI is definitely cleaner, and towns are broken down into areas containing three or four lots that can be fast-travelled between but not explored freely.

As a result the game runs smoothly, your Sims react quicker to your commands and it’s a friendlier place for first-timers. but it’s a hollow victory in the name of simplicity  in the process you lose the sense of being part of a living, changing town, and basic functions such as telling a Sim how longto do something for (until your skill improves, for example) are now dust in the wind .

emotions don’t fill that hole, but they do play a big part in making your personal narrative in the game richer, more unpredictable, and unique to each Sim’s Simology. Soon after moving in we threw a party to get our face out there to the locals. We say party actually we just hit on one girl all night while the other seven guests watched, sometimes dipping out to pull a book off our shelf,
put it down on our bed and then return to watch our floundering attempts at romance. And here’s the thing because it was going badly, we got embarrassed.
Not because we, as grown ups, were spending our evening being shot down in a game aimed at tweens (although that didn’t feel great). We mean our Sim got embarrassed and his body language and interaction choices changed accordingly. crestfallen, all he wanted to do now was tell self-deprecating jokes and play videogames, and at that point well, you have to hand it to the game for mirroring reality so cutely.

The little improvement the game demonstrates here does nothing to silence your frustrations at everything it leaves out. It’s hard not to be suspicious that the base game’s so light on content because the series is built around an expansion pack model but in any case, there’s simply no reason to play this if you bought into The Sims 3 to any extent.

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