The Sims 4 | Game Review

The Sims is back! And worse than ever! After the massive steps forward made in Sims 3, it’s all be undone for the poor Sims of Sims 4 land. After a very impressive hype for the latest instalment in the ever-successful Sims franchise, there were a boast of new features including Sim emotions, a revolutionary create-a-Sim and a range of hobbies to do and skills to learn.

The best part of the Sims 4 is probably all the new stuff you can do with your Sim. There’s a fresh system for making relationships with other Sims, with a bunch of interactions to kick-start your budding romance or become best friends 5eva. It has also introduced the multi-tasking Sim! So you can sit at your computer playing video games, and talk to someone at the same time (DISCLOSER: this would never happen in real life).

There are also a far few new skills to learn. The standout skills being Video Gaming and Comedy, which have not been seen before. These all contribute to the new careers, which do include a Video gaming job which hasn't surfaced since Sims 2 and old favourites like the Astronaut. These fair few career branches will give your Sim a bit more personality than has already been pumped into them.

Sims 4's user interface is appalling. In previous Sims, the menus and seeing the needs of your Sims was extremely easy to navigate, now, not so much. So your Sims will pee themselves… A lot, and probably starve to death while they’re at it before passing out in their own pee. This could all be avoided for your poor Sim if the game was simpler to use.

The creative side of it, through create-a-Sim mainly is entirely unnecessary. Before it was very simple to make a Sim that looked exactly like you, and they tried to show that you could do it even deeper in Sims 4. You can’t. The major extremes of how big your nose can go or how teeny tiny your feet are is pretty much impossible to get perfect. It is true that you can customise EVERYTHING, but it’s really not necessary. And they’ve removed create a style, famous from Sims 3, which restricts your creative flow further. What would be expected would be a bigger variety of styles already there for you to use. Nope. Very limited still. And the hairstyles look like Lego hair. Not an attractive look for your Sim or any Sim for that matter. 

Building mode is very finicky too, with very fiddly controls to try master as you make your Sim their dream home. There is some nice original furniture to put in your home, but not many styles to make it fit into your house.

Aspirations have gotten worse too, although there is a wider range of choice over what you can strive for in life, with deviance and popularity being the main ones, but within each category, there are only one or two choices over what you can do. Hopefully future updates will patch in some more to cover up this shortcoming.

Unfortunately for Sims fans, I’m sure they’re feeling a little hard done by with this latest offering from their favourite game. There’s very little in the way of positive things to say about The Sims 4. There is always the chance that the new gameplay may warm to anyone who feels a bit disgruntled currently, but that may be a while yet.

5/10