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score: 4/10PROS:
Beautiful graphics and realistic body/facial animations Great voice work and overall excellent sound design Enhanced Build Mode features quickly creates nice structures CONS:
Boring, vapid, and superficial gameplay Sims emotions swing wildly and are more a mechanic than a feature Controls are frustrating and many, many other poor design choices (and far too many other cons to list...) |
The Sims 4 Continuing the line of now ubiquitous titles The Sims 4 is a game with an identity crisis, simultaneously trying to blaze a new trail while dragging decade old gameplay mechanics out from the dust. The fourth installation of the franchise adds interesting new technologies and changes up gameplay in some surprising ways, but glaring omissions of staple interactions and the deletion of some of the more mundane aspects of living ruins the overall experience. The game struggles to claim its own self-identity as many aspects of the game come off as half-baked, lazily planned and executed, and bizarre due to perplexing design choices. The franchise is known for giving players rigid control over their digital families and the places they live and work; that control has been forcibly extracted leaving behind a shell of a game wherein Maxis seems more interested in self-aggrandizing their “improved” engine over building a competent title in a refresh of a well-established franchise. The new Create-a-Sim and Build Mode tools are exceptionally handled with enhancements helping to create striking Sims and beautiful dwellings, but the extreme confines surrounding the game mean you won’t have many options to actually do anything with your creations. The Gallery, a new tool to browse and download other player’s creations or upload your own without having to exit the game, is rendered almost obsolete due to tiny worlds that cannot be customized with additional building space. Where The Sims 3 blew the franchise wide open with huge worlds to explore and customize, The Sims 4 attempted to create a more intimate experience that largely backfired. Clothing, wall coverings, and furniture can no longer be customized at your leisure making it difficult to craft unique and unified looks for your Sims and their surroundings. The Sims 4 winds up being lifeless and lacks any cohesive direction with a generous helping of frustration and needless restriction. While some of the changes are welcome, though they fix only a few of the problems that have plagued the franchise since its inception, they come at a deep cost. As a long time The Sims fan I gave the game a fair shot and desperately tried to fight the negative feelings creeping up the longer I played. In the end I found the game to be diluted and more appropriate for tablet-style gaming than a proper PC game. The Sims 4 limps blindly along rather than blazes forth and I can’t help but feel that the new emotions and multi-tasking interactions erase the fact that the game has been stripped to the bone. After 30 hours of gameplay I walked away from The Sims 4 feeling unsatisfied and quite bored with little motivation to return…ever.
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graphics
The fresh coat of paint smeared across the face of The Sims 4 brings a colorful splash to an already saccharine franchise. The high contrast and deep saturation produces Sims and spaces that are vibrant and absolutely shimmering with movement and vitality. The color scheme is pleasing, though Maxis has decided that adding a color wheel to really give stuff personality would have been too much to ask from the engine. Like the style of that shirt? Well, you better only like it in the 5 preselected patterns we've chosen for you. Does that modern couch fit in exactly with your newly constructed house? Well, it’ll never match the wallpaper and we hope you weren’t expecting it to come in green! The appealing graphics quickly become leaden as you give up trying to create incorporated aesthetics. They become outright infuriating as you try to grapple with your newfound inability to create anything truly diverse. The vice grip means most Sims and structures blur together in their monotony with very few standouts.
The game gives you two worlds to explore, one a bayou inspired suburb and the other a desert oasis. With no apparent connection to each other they’re microcosms existing as another example of Maxis showing off with very little payback from all the pre-release boasting we had to endure. They’re really beautiful and distinctly unique, but both are roughly equivalent: a few residential plots, a “juice bar”, a museum, and a library that are graphically divergent but functionally the same. Gone are the days of an open world, where you tell your Sim to hop in the car and drive across town to visit a friend or enjoy the sunshine in the park. When I say there’s no apparent connection it’s because every single time you want to go someplace new the game tosses a loading screen onto your monitor. If you want to enjoy the upgraded graphics you’re going to have to meter that enjoyment as you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at a stark white loading screen. It breaks immersion immediately and continually, and I found it so egregious that I generally stopped visiting other lots.
If you can overlook the game being designed to wrestle the creative spirit from your grasp then you’re sure to enjoy the refreshed graphics. Sims appear smoother and more natural with body and facial animations that are tremendously expressive. Create-a-Sim has gotten a facelift and making a Sim is as easy as grabbing a body part and dragging your mouse to change its appearance. It can be finicky and having the option to display sliders instead of relying on the click-and-drag mechanic would have been a welcome addition to assist in broad control. Zooming in and watching the facial animations as Sims chitchat shows there was a lot of thought put into making your electronic denizens less static, though Sims have always been expressive so it’s not really that drastic of a change. Sims can now multitask, and it keeps the action moving at a more natural pace, but it isn't implemented well. Sims play musical chairs in order to eat as a group; members vie for seating so they can be directly across from one another just to have a simple conversation over a plate of food. They also look slightly antisocial as they generally refuse to make eye contact and group conversations devolve into a terrifying mess that you’d be hard pressed to keep track of. With all this multitasking going on it becomes far too easy to keep your Sims content as multiple needs are handled simultaneously. The beautiful graphics crumble under the weight of strange game behavior and a constant stream of loading screens. You’re immersion in the action is molested again and again; for as supposedly emotional and reactive as your Sims are, they’re suffocated under poor design choices and poorly written game code.
The game gives you two worlds to explore, one a bayou inspired suburb and the other a desert oasis. With no apparent connection to each other they’re microcosms existing as another example of Maxis showing off with very little payback from all the pre-release boasting we had to endure. They’re really beautiful and distinctly unique, but both are roughly equivalent: a few residential plots, a “juice bar”, a museum, and a library that are graphically divergent but functionally the same. Gone are the days of an open world, where you tell your Sim to hop in the car and drive across town to visit a friend or enjoy the sunshine in the park. When I say there’s no apparent connection it’s because every single time you want to go someplace new the game tosses a loading screen onto your monitor. If you want to enjoy the upgraded graphics you’re going to have to meter that enjoyment as you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at a stark white loading screen. It breaks immersion immediately and continually, and I found it so egregious that I generally stopped visiting other lots.
If you can overlook the game being designed to wrestle the creative spirit from your grasp then you’re sure to enjoy the refreshed graphics. Sims appear smoother and more natural with body and facial animations that are tremendously expressive. Create-a-Sim has gotten a facelift and making a Sim is as easy as grabbing a body part and dragging your mouse to change its appearance. It can be finicky and having the option to display sliders instead of relying on the click-and-drag mechanic would have been a welcome addition to assist in broad control. Zooming in and watching the facial animations as Sims chitchat shows there was a lot of thought put into making your electronic denizens less static, though Sims have always been expressive so it’s not really that drastic of a change. Sims can now multitask, and it keeps the action moving at a more natural pace, but it isn't implemented well. Sims play musical chairs in order to eat as a group; members vie for seating so they can be directly across from one another just to have a simple conversation over a plate of food. They also look slightly antisocial as they generally refuse to make eye contact and group conversations devolve into a terrifying mess that you’d be hard pressed to keep track of. With all this multitasking going on it becomes far too easy to keep your Sims content as multiple needs are handled simultaneously. The beautiful graphics crumble under the weight of strange game behavior and a constant stream of loading screens. You’re immersion in the action is molested again and again; for as supposedly emotional and reactive as your Sims are, they’re suffocated under poor design choices and poorly written game code.
Sound
The vocalizations of your Sims have received a lovely overhaul. They still speak in their native Simlish but each emotional state comes with unique manners of speech: angry Sims have a bite in their voice and curtly respond to questions, sad Sims mumble under their breath and mutter to themselves amid sighs, bored Sims voices trail off as they search for something to liven up the banter. The new manners of speaking are recorded well and are done with enough goofy melodrama to convey your Sims feelings quickly and effectively. Conversations come to life as Sims expressing themselves under this new style gives them soul in a nice departure from previous The Sims “on rails” interactions. However, it doesn't take long to hear recycled lines and witness the attached animations reprocessed.
Small jingles play each time a Sim is heavily influenced by a new emotional state or to obnoxiously signify an increase in skill level or some dumb “achievement”. It’s easy to gauge how your Sim is feeling and each is intended to make changes in mood instantly recognizable. A slow dirge signifies a problem while happy ditties usually mean everything is A-OK. It’s a creative way of conveying complex information using sound design alone. Keeping your ears open to these intonations makes managing your Sims a breeze by being able to quickly scan your household for portraits highlighted in varying degrees of red, denoting the unhappy offender.
The music still retains the same spirit as in other The Sims games, bouncy tunes that add an effervescent whimsy to the entire experience. Sims still tend to turn every device on for no reason, blaring the TV and radio simultaneously while playing a video game on the computer and having conversations among everyone in the vicinity. The multitasking additions are nice but, since Sims are compelled by weird coding, your speakers quickly overflow with a bunch of indistinguishable noise. Sound alters on the fly in a nice flourish; the farther you move away from the source the more muffled it becomes. Sims generate dynamic sounds such as slamming the refrigerator door when they’re mad or aggressively chopping food if cooking while tense. Maxis did a great job using sound to compliment the overall gameplay experience and tossed in a few creative systems that are new to the franchise, but the slick graphics and superb sound engineering don’t hold much weight when added to the boring gameplay.
Small jingles play each time a Sim is heavily influenced by a new emotional state or to obnoxiously signify an increase in skill level or some dumb “achievement”. It’s easy to gauge how your Sim is feeling and each is intended to make changes in mood instantly recognizable. A slow dirge signifies a problem while happy ditties usually mean everything is A-OK. It’s a creative way of conveying complex information using sound design alone. Keeping your ears open to these intonations makes managing your Sims a breeze by being able to quickly scan your household for portraits highlighted in varying degrees of red, denoting the unhappy offender.
The music still retains the same spirit as in other The Sims games, bouncy tunes that add an effervescent whimsy to the entire experience. Sims still tend to turn every device on for no reason, blaring the TV and radio simultaneously while playing a video game on the computer and having conversations among everyone in the vicinity. The multitasking additions are nice but, since Sims are compelled by weird coding, your speakers quickly overflow with a bunch of indistinguishable noise. Sound alters on the fly in a nice flourish; the farther you move away from the source the more muffled it becomes. Sims generate dynamic sounds such as slamming the refrigerator door when they’re mad or aggressively chopping food if cooking while tense. Maxis did a great job using sound to compliment the overall gameplay experience and tossed in a few creative systems that are new to the franchise, but the slick graphics and superb sound engineering don’t hold much weight when added to the boring gameplay.
GamePLay
We were all expecting The Sims 4 to be revolutionary by utilizing the new, powerful hardware at our disposal. What we got is a game that leans on an old 32-bit executable (ask Google why this is a problem as it’s too complex to discuss here) and has minimum specifications from the Windows XP era. I understand that The Sims franchise is partly so successful because it’s able to reach a wide audience of folks with playstyles as diverse as their computers. It seems like a cheap way of blaming the consumer for not having the intelligence to know their rig’s specs before purchasing a game. It’s borderline insulting to have a game released in 2014 rely on 20 year old programming concepts from a time when a 256Mb graphics card was considered cutting edge and the very first multi-core processors were just being released to the consumer market. PC gamers have evolved and changed as increasingly more powerful hardware has been released and perfected and new game interactions have been introduced and cultured. To spend $60+ on a game that can’t even address half of your computer’s power is disgusting. Part of the reason with the sudden downturn in gameplay, and program execution from the late days of Windows 95, is that many people are attempting to run The Sims 4 on laptops. I've read multiple posts asking if a certain laptop will run The Sims 4, and if this is the audience Maxis was attempting to appease then they succeeded. The Sims 4 feels more like a tablet app (designed in a way that shows this may have been a potential operating platform) than a game worthy of such an extreme price tag. The sudden deluge of players expecting to run a modern game on underpowered hardware easily explains the subsequent stripping of the game to almost nothing, and the reliance on coding that can only address 4Gb of RAM or less and only a single processor core points to mobile gaming as the true target audience. Again, to release a PC game with a AAA price tag and THIS is what they come up with is completely unacceptable; free-to-play and microtransactions would have suited The Sims 4 much better.
Outside of the executable relying on outmoded coding, the gameplay itself is pretty boring. I've seen plenty of comments slamming reviews for having the “audacity” of comparing The Sims 4 to previous games. The issue with thinking this isn't acceptable is that we must look back on a franchise as a point of reference and to extrapolate precedent. Each new entry has blossomed to take advantage of evermore powerful hardware and each reboot has evolved alongside the forward movement of technology. The Sims gave us a taste of the concept, The Sims 2 brought us a fully 3D world and more expressive Sims, and The Sims 3 opened up the world by giving us a huge sandbox to play in. The Sims 4 slams on the brakes and whips around to emulate The Sims 2 which entailed gameplay that was revolutionary in 2004. With that said, I've seen a vast amount of comments from gamers who are using laptops exclusively for gaming and this is probably where Maxis was hedging their bet. Unfortunately the typical laptop is too anemic for any type of “serious” gaming, leading to hardware-punishing production being abandoned in favor of run-down coding and a game that’s largely unenjoyable and needlessly frustrating due to the limitations of “portable gaming” being the lowest common denominator.
With The Sims 4 not allowing an open world because of the expectation of supremely underpowered hardware being the norm, managing a household becomes an unnecessary chore. Taking your Sim to any lot requires a loading screen. Even though public lots are bustling with Sims just getting there breaks immersion immediately as you have to sit through a 10 second loading screen. Once your Sim is at the new location you have to fight for space to actually interact with anything as public lots are usually too full. You’ll be spending more time waiting for a workout machine to open up, wasting precious time to increase your Sims fitness level, with an activity that can be done at home much more easily. Using your cell phone as some sort of magical device, being teleported back home (they couldn’t even add a car or taxi as some sort of “sink” to disappear into!) you’ll usually find your family standing at the curb doing a whole lot of nothing. Sims that are at work or school when you leave will magically be transported home, immediately walking to the street to disappear back to work. This is just one example out of many in which the flow of the game is whipped up, tossed around, broken, smashed, etc. This review would wind up being fifty pages long if I attempted to succinctly list each and every complaint I have. I’ll just say it’s hard to stay in the game when issues like this keep piling on top of each other into a huge mound of repugnance and aggravation.
Outside of the executable relying on outmoded coding, the gameplay itself is pretty boring. I've seen plenty of comments slamming reviews for having the “audacity” of comparing The Sims 4 to previous games. The issue with thinking this isn't acceptable is that we must look back on a franchise as a point of reference and to extrapolate precedent. Each new entry has blossomed to take advantage of evermore powerful hardware and each reboot has evolved alongside the forward movement of technology. The Sims gave us a taste of the concept, The Sims 2 brought us a fully 3D world and more expressive Sims, and The Sims 3 opened up the world by giving us a huge sandbox to play in. The Sims 4 slams on the brakes and whips around to emulate The Sims 2 which entailed gameplay that was revolutionary in 2004. With that said, I've seen a vast amount of comments from gamers who are using laptops exclusively for gaming and this is probably where Maxis was hedging their bet. Unfortunately the typical laptop is too anemic for any type of “serious” gaming, leading to hardware-punishing production being abandoned in favor of run-down coding and a game that’s largely unenjoyable and needlessly frustrating due to the limitations of “portable gaming” being the lowest common denominator.
With The Sims 4 not allowing an open world because of the expectation of supremely underpowered hardware being the norm, managing a household becomes an unnecessary chore. Taking your Sim to any lot requires a loading screen. Even though public lots are bustling with Sims just getting there breaks immersion immediately as you have to sit through a 10 second loading screen. Once your Sim is at the new location you have to fight for space to actually interact with anything as public lots are usually too full. You’ll be spending more time waiting for a workout machine to open up, wasting precious time to increase your Sims fitness level, with an activity that can be done at home much more easily. Using your cell phone as some sort of magical device, being teleported back home (they couldn’t even add a car or taxi as some sort of “sink” to disappear into!) you’ll usually find your family standing at the curb doing a whole lot of nothing. Sims that are at work or school when you leave will magically be transported home, immediately walking to the street to disappear back to work. This is just one example out of many in which the flow of the game is whipped up, tossed around, broken, smashed, etc. This review would wind up being fifty pages long if I attempted to succinctly list each and every complaint I have. I’ll just say it’s hard to stay in the game when issues like this keep piling on top of each other into a huge mound of repugnance and aggravation.
When you take a single Sim out into the “greater world” your household is left to fend for itself. You’re only given a few options to help keep your inactive Sims occupied while you’re out on the town. “Care for self” or “Tend garden” become meaningless when, upon returning to your home lot, it looks like nothing happened. Home-based services are also largely missing; for example, if there’s no adult on the lot, your infant disappears to be cared for by "daycare" only to suddenly reappearing when an adult returns home. The game does a lot of this “behind the scenes” junk and it really tears any sense of realism to itty bitty bits. With a clear focus on the gamification of The Sims 4, with achievements splashing across the screen amid bells and whistles that conjure up thoughts of the addictive feedback loop of slot machines, your main focus is continually turned towards constant, worthless busywork. The fine control we became accustomed to in The Sims 3, zooming around the map and assigning new tasks to each of our Sims individually, has been ripped from the experience. Sure, now your children can decide for themselves to do their homework but not before standing still for three hours. Sims won’t even break their current activity to use the bathroom if the meter gets low; apparently peeing your pants every day is the kind of humor Maxis was going for. Sims will not autonomously perform necessary actions without your express command nor will they attempt to increase a needed skill while you’re busy at the library tooling around and they're on the inactive home lot. Bringing your Sims out into the neighborhood is an option but the way the game is set up its more of a hassle than anything else. You can switch control to a different Sim if you don’t mind being treated to yet ANOTHER loading screen and preventing your previously controlled Sim from completing whatever it was you had them working towards. It really becomes a hot mess of a game when trying to travel to other places, sitting through endless loading screens in order to do so, and it’s impossible to keep tabs on other members of a household. Top if off with the weird behavior when travelling between multiple lots, and a general lack of content and activities, and the game comes completely apart at the seams. And what you see is what you get as almost all the issues with this game can’t be fixed with patches and DLC. It really is another SimCity.
The world is outrageously small and, without being able to add new lots and twist the game map to your liking, everything starts to implode. You can just delete all the prebuilt lots and start from scratch but it feels futile to do so. The extreme lack of empty zones means you’ll hit the ceiling relatively quickly trying to populate your world. This cannot be fixed with a simple patch, so for the lifetime of The Sims 4 we’ll be stuck with tiny maps, constant loading screens, and no room to express our creativity. Without having significant control over Sims on the inactive lot, there’s very little incentive to go anywhere and the lack of open world gameplay leads to a feeling of being shackled to one place. In The Sims 3 most careers were self-contained in “rabbit holes”, places in which your Sims disappeared into to while away for a paycheck at the end of their shift, but in The Sims 4 you don’t even get a car that comes to pick your Sim up a la The Sims 1 & 2. They just disappear at the curb and go…somewhere. Oh, and everything is done through the cell phone. Sure most of us use our phones for almost everything but in The Sims 4 is cumbersome and difficult to manage. The game lacks direction in almost every way possible and when you see how quickly it begins to bug out and misbehave it becomes clear that the development team seemed to want to take concepts from every previous title but didn't polish and hone them to a brilliant shine. It seems that they slapped together a lot of disparate concepts and gameplay elements and called it a day. It’s shameful, too, considering the franchise has had over a decade to mature and The Sims 4 does a complete 180, heading into the past for all the wrong reasons.
The much touted emotions system is actually a very shallow addition that is easily circumvented, and the emotional state of your Sims is so easily manipulated they come off as bipolar wrecks instead of having naturally shifting dispositions. I had a Sim drop dead in front of his family and only one family member reacted, the rest either walked away to play on the computer or fix themselves something to eat. The reactive Sim had a sad mood that lasted for two in-game days and the rest of the family was so happy it was disturbing. It was painless to keep the miserable Sim active and productive and the special interactions are mixed in with all the “normal” actions. Even though my Sim should have spent two days in a deep depression it was surprisingly easy to keep him joking and flirty. Being in any one of the deep emotional states doesn't lock out conflicting actions so there’s next to no challenge trying to guide your Sims through the ups and downs of their little lives. The system is so superficial that obtaining the necessary mood for a career boost is as easy as pulling up the cell phone for a quick Internet browsing session. In a game that restricts almost everything this is an area that’s so vapid and would have greatly benefited from Maxis' heavy-handedness. Also, there are only a handful of personality traits that never seem to have any deep impact on gameplay. For all the buzz around your Sims being realistic and your experience altered by their personality and emotions, the systems surrounding these mechanics is the most shoddy construct I've come across in this game, and I have a laundry list of things I find shoddy in The Sims 4. Drop a few objects that exude an “emotional aura” into your Sims house and watch the mood swings run rampant, making it nearly impossible to help your Sims achieve the mood-dependent "whims" that generate lifetime points that can be used to purchase even MORE junk to cheat the game’s systems.
If this review is sounding like a mess of complaints, ideas, and criticisms it’s because the game is a mess of concepts, mechanics, and half assed implementation of poorly conceived gameplay prospects. In the marketing material The Sims 4 was promoted as giving you the ability to create “weirder stories” and it couldn't be true enough. Those weird stories are a fancy way of saying that game just doesn't work in any sort of rational way. I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that The Sims 4 was actually going to be some sort of always-online MMO-hybrid-mobile-freemium rubbish which may explain for the crappy game engine and the massive amounts of missing content and interactivity.
The world is outrageously small and, without being able to add new lots and twist the game map to your liking, everything starts to implode. You can just delete all the prebuilt lots and start from scratch but it feels futile to do so. The extreme lack of empty zones means you’ll hit the ceiling relatively quickly trying to populate your world. This cannot be fixed with a simple patch, so for the lifetime of The Sims 4 we’ll be stuck with tiny maps, constant loading screens, and no room to express our creativity. Without having significant control over Sims on the inactive lot, there’s very little incentive to go anywhere and the lack of open world gameplay leads to a feeling of being shackled to one place. In The Sims 3 most careers were self-contained in “rabbit holes”, places in which your Sims disappeared into to while away for a paycheck at the end of their shift, but in The Sims 4 you don’t even get a car that comes to pick your Sim up a la The Sims 1 & 2. They just disappear at the curb and go…somewhere. Oh, and everything is done through the cell phone. Sure most of us use our phones for almost everything but in The Sims 4 is cumbersome and difficult to manage. The game lacks direction in almost every way possible and when you see how quickly it begins to bug out and misbehave it becomes clear that the development team seemed to want to take concepts from every previous title but didn't polish and hone them to a brilliant shine. It seems that they slapped together a lot of disparate concepts and gameplay elements and called it a day. It’s shameful, too, considering the franchise has had over a decade to mature and The Sims 4 does a complete 180, heading into the past for all the wrong reasons.
The much touted emotions system is actually a very shallow addition that is easily circumvented, and the emotional state of your Sims is so easily manipulated they come off as bipolar wrecks instead of having naturally shifting dispositions. I had a Sim drop dead in front of his family and only one family member reacted, the rest either walked away to play on the computer or fix themselves something to eat. The reactive Sim had a sad mood that lasted for two in-game days and the rest of the family was so happy it was disturbing. It was painless to keep the miserable Sim active and productive and the special interactions are mixed in with all the “normal” actions. Even though my Sim should have spent two days in a deep depression it was surprisingly easy to keep him joking and flirty. Being in any one of the deep emotional states doesn't lock out conflicting actions so there’s next to no challenge trying to guide your Sims through the ups and downs of their little lives. The system is so superficial that obtaining the necessary mood for a career boost is as easy as pulling up the cell phone for a quick Internet browsing session. In a game that restricts almost everything this is an area that’s so vapid and would have greatly benefited from Maxis' heavy-handedness. Also, there are only a handful of personality traits that never seem to have any deep impact on gameplay. For all the buzz around your Sims being realistic and your experience altered by their personality and emotions, the systems surrounding these mechanics is the most shoddy construct I've come across in this game, and I have a laundry list of things I find shoddy in The Sims 4. Drop a few objects that exude an “emotional aura” into your Sims house and watch the mood swings run rampant, making it nearly impossible to help your Sims achieve the mood-dependent "whims" that generate lifetime points that can be used to purchase even MORE junk to cheat the game’s systems.
If this review is sounding like a mess of complaints, ideas, and criticisms it’s because the game is a mess of concepts, mechanics, and half assed implementation of poorly conceived gameplay prospects. In the marketing material The Sims 4 was promoted as giving you the ability to create “weirder stories” and it couldn't be true enough. Those weird stories are a fancy way of saying that game just doesn't work in any sort of rational way. I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that The Sims 4 was actually going to be some sort of always-online MMO-hybrid-mobile-freemium rubbish which may explain for the crappy game engine and the massive amounts of missing content and interactivity.
Final Thoughts
I actually had a lot of fun when I first started playing The Sims 4. The new social interaction and emotional responses from your Sims breathes life into these fake humans in a refreshing way. At first glance they seem more human, more than a set of rigid instructions with the patina of realism as seen in previous The Sims titles. It didn’t take long for the game to grow stale (about an hour), and once that settled in it took even less time for the game to feel bland and boring (about an hour and a half). I had to force myself to continue playing to get this review done because playing The Sims 4 is a chore and anything but enjoyable. Some of the omitted gameplay elements aren't much missed but the lack of simple things like dishwashers and babies that can be interacted with in any kind of human way showcases how rushed The Sims 4 was. Again, I think something happened during development after the botched attempt at a SimCity reboot and that lead to massive amounts of completed game elements being quickly cut out and quietly discarded. And this review can only give you a vague idea of the plethora of other issues I've come across. The game, when taken in as a whole, is just really lame and I hate feeling like that. This is a franchise I used to trust, one I've seen change and grow in unexpected ways. To see it treated with such disregard shows how lazy Maxis has become and how EA would rather shovel garbage onto store shelves than give their developers time to produce quality products. Seeing the branch of Maxis responsible for the SimCity revival closed gives me little hope for the rest of the company; since The Sims 4 is being met with similar response I suspect this is going to be the last of The Sims we’re going to see.
With the sheer amount of missing content it becomes obvious that Maxis is going to release a lot of objects and features through expansion packs and possibly a digital storefront. The Sims 3 saw this trend occur at an alarming rate, eventually releasing expansion packs that were pretty much out-of-control-goofy such as Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats and Supernatural and the addition of a digital store that pretty much sold heavily overpriced worlds and furniture sets. I don’t see The Sims 4 bucking that trend any time soon; if anything, I see this game further increasing the attitude that “If it’s got The Sims on it it’ll sell”. The Sims 4 is following a line of thinking that’s anticipating mobile gaming as the next best thing and as such it’s designed around hardware that’s not nearly as robust as the traditional desktop environment. I almost felt like I was playing a tablet app than a full-fledged game with a ridiculous asking price of ~$70. It’s outright infuriating that Maxis and EA would assume such a boring game, with such little content available, would be worth this kind of money when the free-to-play model would have served much better.
The Sims 4 was really disappointing to me, especially coming off of The Sims 3 platform that gave such a wealth of content and control that was further expanded upon by some really neat expansion packs such as Pets and Seasons but got too bloated for its own good and eventually started to look desperate for attention. The Sims 4, however, shoehorns old gameplay styles into a pretty package, with the prospect of overpriced DLC used in an attempt to fix this ruin of a game on the near horizon. The game looks great and your Sims appear more alive, but the flimsy framework surrounding them just can’t hold up for long term enjoyment. The obvious bugs, the serious deficiency in content, the lack of control, the pointlessness of exploring the worlds, the frustration in trying to manage multiple Sims through an endless slog of loading screens, not knowing what your household is actually doing while you’re away from your home lot, Sims that are nowhere near as intelligent or responsive as Maxis would like you to believe, it all comes crashing down in a spectacular heap of slag. The game may benefit from the forthcoming flood of additional paid content (as of this writing some missing features such as ghosts and pools have been patched in for free, but they’re really nothing special nor do they particularly enhance gameplay in any substantial way) but most of what makes this game so spectacularly boring and dull can’t be fixed with patches or game updates. We can say goodbye to the open world, cars, babies that aren't treated as objects, large worlds that evolve, the list goes on and on ad nauseum. Even though the engine running The Sims 3 was enormous and a little creaky, the gameplay looked back on the series and came up with some creative ways to enhance the experience. The Sims 4, instead, looked back on the series and started hacking away at what made the series so much fun to play all to reduce the minimum recommended specs, possibly in an attempt to get it to run on iOS and Android. What’s left is an empty husk of concepts and ideas that are so superficial that all the life has been sucked out of a franchise that’s been immensely influential to the industry. I usually can recommend lackluster games if you can catch them on sale, but my experience with The Sims 4 have so far been nothing but frustration and boredom. As such, I would say you can leave this game at the door. Stick to The Sims 3 with some cherry picked expansion packs if you want creative freedom or The Sims 2 if you need a more individualistic experience. If you’d rather been upset and struggle against the tide go ahead and abuse yourself with The Sims 4. And if you’re REALLY desperate to support Maxis and their recent track record of video game trash then go ahead and snatch up a copy and force yourself to like it. If the recent closing of the Maxis office responsible for the poorly received SimCity is any indication, the rest of the company, kept on life support by The Sims franchise, won’t be far behind.
With the sheer amount of missing content it becomes obvious that Maxis is going to release a lot of objects and features through expansion packs and possibly a digital storefront. The Sims 3 saw this trend occur at an alarming rate, eventually releasing expansion packs that were pretty much out-of-control-goofy such as Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats and Supernatural and the addition of a digital store that pretty much sold heavily overpriced worlds and furniture sets. I don’t see The Sims 4 bucking that trend any time soon; if anything, I see this game further increasing the attitude that “If it’s got The Sims on it it’ll sell”. The Sims 4 is following a line of thinking that’s anticipating mobile gaming as the next best thing and as such it’s designed around hardware that’s not nearly as robust as the traditional desktop environment. I almost felt like I was playing a tablet app than a full-fledged game with a ridiculous asking price of ~$70. It’s outright infuriating that Maxis and EA would assume such a boring game, with such little content available, would be worth this kind of money when the free-to-play model would have served much better.
The Sims 4 was really disappointing to me, especially coming off of The Sims 3 platform that gave such a wealth of content and control that was further expanded upon by some really neat expansion packs such as Pets and Seasons but got too bloated for its own good and eventually started to look desperate for attention. The Sims 4, however, shoehorns old gameplay styles into a pretty package, with the prospect of overpriced DLC used in an attempt to fix this ruin of a game on the near horizon. The game looks great and your Sims appear more alive, but the flimsy framework surrounding them just can’t hold up for long term enjoyment. The obvious bugs, the serious deficiency in content, the lack of control, the pointlessness of exploring the worlds, the frustration in trying to manage multiple Sims through an endless slog of loading screens, not knowing what your household is actually doing while you’re away from your home lot, Sims that are nowhere near as intelligent or responsive as Maxis would like you to believe, it all comes crashing down in a spectacular heap of slag. The game may benefit from the forthcoming flood of additional paid content (as of this writing some missing features such as ghosts and pools have been patched in for free, but they’re really nothing special nor do they particularly enhance gameplay in any substantial way) but most of what makes this game so spectacularly boring and dull can’t be fixed with patches or game updates. We can say goodbye to the open world, cars, babies that aren't treated as objects, large worlds that evolve, the list goes on and on ad nauseum. Even though the engine running The Sims 3 was enormous and a little creaky, the gameplay looked back on the series and came up with some creative ways to enhance the experience. The Sims 4, instead, looked back on the series and started hacking away at what made the series so much fun to play all to reduce the minimum recommended specs, possibly in an attempt to get it to run on iOS and Android. What’s left is an empty husk of concepts and ideas that are so superficial that all the life has been sucked out of a franchise that’s been immensely influential to the industry. I usually can recommend lackluster games if you can catch them on sale, but my experience with The Sims 4 have so far been nothing but frustration and boredom. As such, I would say you can leave this game at the door. Stick to The Sims 3 with some cherry picked expansion packs if you want creative freedom or The Sims 2 if you need a more individualistic experience. If you’d rather been upset and struggle against the tide go ahead and abuse yourself with The Sims 4. And if you’re REALLY desperate to support Maxis and their recent track record of video game trash then go ahead and snatch up a copy and force yourself to like it. If the recent closing of the Maxis office responsible for the poorly received SimCity is any indication, the rest of the company, kept on life support by The Sims franchise, won’t be far behind.