I’ll admit it: I’ve loved The Sims since the beginning, so it was no surprise that I was excited to play The Sims 4. While I enjoyed certain new features of The Sims 3, it was never my favorite installment in the series. In fact, I felt that it was a bit too complicated for it’s own good — after all, the game itself is a relatively simple simulation where you are a god and everyone else is a minion for your amusement. There’s no real story and no real goal to The Sims except for what you want it to be, and sometimes I felt that the mechanics of TS3 made it hard to experience that enjoyment.
This is not the case with The Sims 4. So far, I’ve spent about 12 hours with the game since its release, so this is a bit of an early review and I may add on more later. However, what I’ve seen is a lot of fun. We’re going to split this review up into a few sections: Create-a-Sim, Build Mode, Gameplay, and Graphics/Sound/Performance.
Create-a-Sim
Create-a-Sim is the first thing you’ll be doing in the game, unless you decided to take over an existing family. There are a lot of things that I love about the new tools, but it’s easily summed up simply by viewing the initial CaS screen: there are no sliders. Anywhere. And, frankly, it’s beautiful. It makes so much more sense to simply drag or push the features of your sim that you want to change, and it’s really intuitive, too. There are a few other really awesome things. For the first time, the clothing in The Sims feels modern and up-to-date without having to download clothing add-ons. I feel that somehow no one was ever really able to get that right in The Sims before, but this game did a great job. I also love that there are more customization options in terms of skin: better-looking tattoos exist, and even freckles!
It’s not perfect, though. While I personally don’t miss the Create a Style feature in the Build mode, I do miss it here. There aren’t many hair color options and to be honest, all the browns look some shade of red. I have ashy brown hair, damn it! That being said, it’s really not the end of the world, and I’m sure eventually we will have mods to take care of that (as we always do).
Build Mode
For those of you who haven’t played the game yet, Build mode is now combined with Buy mode, which to be honest makes a lot of sense and I’m not sure why the two weren’t seamlessly integrated before. Build mode has most of the same tools that you’re used to and really functions in a very similar way, so to be honest, there isn’t much to say here. There is one thing that I absolutely hate, though: roofing. I really think that the roof tools are a huge step backwards and are more confusing than they need to be. It’s really hard to get an accurate, nice looking roof on your own (or at least, it’s definitely time consuming) as you have to place rooftops piece by piece now. Sure, you can resize the pieces, but it’s just not intuitive. I miss being able to click a button and BAM – done. I never see my roof when I play, anyway. I just want it to be done for me.
Buy mode largely functions the same as it always has, too. One thing that is new is that you can actually just buy a style for the room – including furniture and design. This is kinda cool for the lazy, but where it really gets cool is being able to take other people’s designs from the Gallery. The Gallery feature allows you to download houses, households (the sims themselves), and room styles. It’s honestly pretty fun to look through.
Gameplay
So far, I’m really enjoying the gameplay of The Sims 4. I’m going to assume here that you’ve played another Sims game, so I don’t have to tell you the basics. One of the biggest improvements in the game is multi-tasking. Now, your sim can play a game on their tablet while watching TV and having a conversation with their roommate, allowing them to fulfill multiple things at once. To an extent, The Sims 3 had this too, at least in terms of conversation, but now it’s obvious what’s happening. The best part is that you don’t have to tell your sim to do these things. If they’re sitting down to dinner in a room that has music, they will automatically start listening to it and getting that need fulfilled. Sometimes this functions strangely though – one of my sims went into the bathroom to say hi to her husband while he was taking a shit, did so, and then she promptly left the room.
One of the other noticeable improvements is that timing on activities has greatly improved. No longer does it take one hour to pee and another to shower leaving your sim with no time to eat before heading to work in the morning. Now, my sim can wake up, shit, shower, cook a meal, and maybe even clean up a bit or play the computer before having to go to work. Part of this is that there is no more carpool – your sim simply leaves right when your shift starts, but these necessary tasks take less time, too. Overall, I think it’s a great improvement.
I don’t want to spoil too much else of the gameplay for you – you really should see it yourself.
Graphics/Sound/Performance
The first thing I noticed about this game is that there is no lag. To be fair, my computers always have been pretty high-end, as I’ve always been a PC gamer. But, while they’ve never struggled to play a current-gen game on ultra, playing older versions of The Sims has always caused my computer to struggle. Currently, I’m playing on ultra with super-fast load times and it doesn’t turn sluggish when I have more than 5-6 sims on a lot (for once). It really is a huge improvement, and if you search for other impressions of The Sims 4, you will see many others saying the same. Of course, your results may very – make sure to play at a level your computer can handle, but it’s generally safe to say that if you play other games at a certain graphical “level” (medium, ultra, etc.), you can play The Sims 4 on that same level and it feels so much better than earlier incarnations of this game.
The graphics for The Sims 4 are great as well. I’m glad that The Sims decided to stay a bit cartoonish, for lack of a better word. I honestly don’t feel the need for hyper-realistic faces in this version of the game, and the animation style that TS4 has suits it well when it comes to facial expressions and body language. The only real complaint I have is that the draw distance for other lots is kind of low, even on ultra, but in the end it’s such a small complaint that it doesn’t really matter.
I don’t have much to say on the sound front – the game is mixed well, and has all the sounds you’ve come to expect from previous versions of The Sims. You can adjust the volume of music, which is nice, I suppose. Other than that: it’s the Sims. The sounds isn’t exactly the biggest part of the game here.
Wrap-up
All in all, I enjoy this new version of The Sims a lot. I can definitely see myself playing it quite a bit over the next few years, and it’s a great game to pick up and play for a bit when I’m too tired from work to play an FPS or a game that requires a lot of thought.
I don’t do scores, but should you buy the game? Yes.
