This week’s Monday Night Gaming / MNG: The Sims 4 Revisited
Back in September 2014, I reviewed the newly released The Sims 4, a game I was highly disappointed in due to EA/Maxis’s lack of…well, anything that made the game good. Recently, EA/Maxis announced that they were mostly doing away with binary gender in the game, which would allow for transgender and gender-fluid characters. Sims would no longer be limited to females wearing female clothing, men having manly frames, etc.
While they may be doing it for the publicity, it endeared me enough that I decided to give Sims 4 another go.
As I originally stated in the first review, the original iteration of the game definitely felt like a beta-test version. Since then, they have brought back:
- pools
- certain normal careers like policeman, doctor/medicine, etc.
- basements
- aliens
- shopping for clothes
- disease & illness
- party invitations
- hiring a gardener and repairman
- the tragic clown
- dish washers & trash compactors
- hot tubs
The expansion packs are fairly cheap and bring back things like:
- running your own business
- running your own restaurant (which is a lot more involved than previous similarly themed Sims expansions)
- actually going to work with playable, active careers (Doctor, Detective, & Scientist).
- New skills: Baking, Photography, DJ skills, dancing, Meditation
- Massages, mud baths, and saunas
The expansions also introduce new things such as:
- Clubs (and a farkton of social events that go with them)
- Camping
- New skills: Herbalism, Wellness
- Yoga
- New traits, achievements, aspirations, objects, clothing, and interactions related to clubs and camping
As with most Sims games, there are stuff packs again, which add a variety of theme-based clothing and objects, but I’ve not explored those so I won’t review them.
There are certainly elements still missing such as toddlers (not that I miss those that much!) and neighborhoods. I hate that, in terms of travel, everything is a rabbit hole. I still miss the bookstore and grocery store, though some of those “neighborhood” elements are creeping back in with restaurants and spas. However, I find it irritating that one can only go to the hospital if you work there or are pregnant. Unlike previous games, the hospital doesn’t rabbit hole when giving birth–you actually go into the hospital. Maybe they are trying to have a dividing line between something being a rabbit hole and something not existing at all?
I think they are heading in the correct direction (finally!), but there is still a lot of work to be done. I sincerely hope they continue to add back elements of the previous games without having to pay for a full expansion to get them.
If you’re curious, you can read my previous review here.
(Images from The Sims 4 are Copyright EA and used under fair use for review purposes only.)
