Great art style, Sims able to multitask, improved building tools
Massive amount of missing features, glitchy, lack of career options
In some ways, The Sims 4 is unchanged from what players of the 14-year-old series have come to expect from Maxis' life management game. It remains a "virtual dollhouse", where you build a dream home in a pseudo-Californian setting, then populate it with AI drones whose lives you oversee like a benign (or malevolent) god.
In so many others though, it feels like this newest batch of Sims lost most of their belongings in an errant U-Haul on their way to the game, and what arrived feels drastically stripped down from its forebears.
The purpose of the game is essentially unchanged. The Sims is about acquiring stuff, an ode to consumerism.
Sure, you don't have to aim for the biggest house and most impressive career, but even if you're trying to play a modest lifestyle -- that of a writer, for instance -- you'll have a constant stream of new items to pick up or small objectives to achieve. It's the drip, drip, drip of getting more and better items that makes the series so addictive, after all; RPG mechanics with levels and stats replaced by a nice new kitchen and a date on Saturday. However, with so much stripped out, it's a threadbare virtual existence.
Fans have already catalogued some of the 80+ features missing or removed from previous games. Not all are bad -- it would be churlish to expect a series halfway through its second decade not to trim the fat, refine what works and what doesn't, and get rid of the chaff. Will anyone really miss not having a curfew on teen characters, or be that put out by no longer having an eyelash length slider? Other omissions actively impede the experience though -- no basements or pools impact how you may want to build your Sims' home, while never getting diseases removes realism from the game. We all get sick from time to time -- why can't I make my Sims suffer along with me?
Bizarrely, the Create a Style feature is gone, apparently incompatible with the new engine. In
The Sims 3, this allowed you to customise just about anything in the game, allowing players to create truly unique homes and items. No more. The "worlds", comprised of clusters of property lots, are also smaller and buffer with loading between each section. At around £50 RRP, it's hard not to feel you're getting shortchanged.
This rash of curious digital absenteeism, whether by design or budget restraints or simply a vastly misunderstood expectation of what the fanbase for The Sims would want from a new generation of the game, isn't the only problem players will face.
The Sims 4 is tremendously buggy. Some issues are long-standing ones, the sort that you'd expect the developers to have nailed at some point over the last 15-odd years, such as pathfinding. Sims will randomly decide to plot out the most circuitous route to their goal, perhaps deciding it's easier to walk outside a house, circle it, re-enter and sit at the kitchen table rather than just walking across the room. Character lock-up rears a particularly ugly head; I've had my Sim just stand there, mewling away in Simlish to herself, absolutely refusing to move anywhere or interact with anything. The tutorial decided, on first play, to just.... stop.
It's even blue-screened a few times.
Once you can get going, it becomes clear that The Sims 4 is like one of those annoying friends who always tries too hard to be "wacky". There are few serious jobs on offer, and your Sim has a better chance of becoming an astronaut than a cop.
It's not so much that there shouldn't be an avenue to pursue a Dr.
Evil-style criminal empire as your chosen profession, as it is making players who want a more authentic life sim have to work harder for it feels reductive, not additive.
Life progression in general is another sticking point. Few non-player characters seem to do anything other that wait for you to interact with them. Where previously, your neighborhood would change and grow, now no one has kids or moves on with their own lives unless you're part of it. There are no schools or work locations. No shops -- and while the game isn't actually set in California, the lack of retail space is painfully at odds with the vibe. The whole thing feels weirdly sterile at times, when you pull yourself back from the endless acquisition of goods.
There is some good here though. Notably, Sims can finally multitask, allowing them to perform overlapping actions such as working out and holding a conversation, or listening to music while reading a book. You know, like real people, only with the in-game bonus of levelling up attributes. The mood system is also great, allowing you to pursue romance or build friendships with other Sims by setting the emotion of an action. Of course, it's also open to hilarious abuse, such as exercising while angry or cooking while excited, with pratfalls a likely outcome. Conversations are vastly more open, with conversation trees and numerous options allowing you to win people over, flirt, show off your creativity and more.
Sim creation is actually a blast too, letting you stretch and skew body shapes (although not vertically -- everyone from teen to the elderly is about the same height) and with plenty of customisation tools to create your perfect look. You can even specify a walk style, adding personality and body language to your digital peons. It's simple enough to get straight into the game, up to and including a "randomise" button if you just don't care, while complex enough for all but the most ardent person-makers to enjoy.
Adding traits, with one major ambition and three character quirks, impacts how they'll respond to stimuli, with literally thousands of combinations allowing for diverse personalities. If you pair Sims up and they get to popping out some digi-babies, those kids will inherit traits from their parents, mixing things up further.
Weirdly, kids go immediately from babies to children, with no toddler phase anymore.
Construction of buildings is also improved as a process, with both pre-styled rooms that can be dropped into place or the option of user-creation right down to the shape of walls. A simple in-game search system also allows you to easily find the item you wish to add to your growing mansion or stylish wardrobe.
If you can look beyond the reams of missing material (and shake the cynical belief that those features are only omitted now so some can be added back in through the series' traditional stream of expansion packs and DLC), The Sims 4 is a gentle step forward. It looks great, with fantastic animation and a friendly art style, and its systems and mechanics are easy to learn and get to grips with. Unfortunately, it's too glitchy and too diminished from its predecessors to really win anyone over, especially those returning from those earlier games.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
