It's taken some time but I'm finally getting back to telling you more about The Sims 4. Sorry it's taken so long but I've become quite addicted.
In spite of all this new stuff, in some ways The Sims 4 goes back to basics. When your Sim goes to work or school, they vanish off to an unknown location, and when visiting community lots or neighbours’ homes there’s a loading screen and any Sims you didn’t bring with you are greyed out.
As it turns out, no. Time continues to run, and, much like selecting work or school tones, you can instruct Sims left at home to build skills, clean the house, tend the garden, socialise with each other or with friends, or just take care of their needs until your gallivanting Sim returns. Or you can switch control to the home, leaving your community lot Sim to his or her own devices, or at any point bring other family members to the same community lot to hang out.
You can also travel to other towns. The Sims 4 base game comes with two towns; Willow Creek, which is a lush suburban town inspired at least in part by Louisiana, and Oasis Springs, a desert town with Spanish mission architecture. The town has different venues, so if you live in Oasis Springs and want to go to the library, you have to go to Willow Creek, and if you live in Willow Creek and feel like chilling in a lounge you go to Oasis Springs. Sims from both towns can be seen walking down the streets of either. Presumably, a new town or two will be added for every expansion pack, and your Sims will be able to travel and move freely between them all.
In addition to the Sims who live in the other houses in your towns, there are also townie Sims who do not. You can’t visit them, but other than that they are fully functional, aging along with your Sims, having children, living life. If you want one of these townies to be your neighbour, you can move them into a house in your neighbourhood. The game will occasionally move some of these townie families into empty houses of its own volition as well.
The new build mode is very user friendly. I built Lynne and Jennifer a new house when they started getting rich (it’s called The Artist’s Abode, and you can download it from the exchange if you like). There are pre-made rooms that you can just put down next to each other and connect, or you can build from scratch, old school. If you feel like a room is in the wrong place you can pick the whole thing up and put it down somewhere else. When decorating, there are many styles and colours to choose from, but you can no longer simply design your own. This means you may not be able to get those curtains to exactly match that couch, but you can probably find some other ones that will. There have been moments where I wished I had a Sims 3 style design tool, but for the most part I haven’t even noticed.
I have been playing The Sims 4 for a week now, and I am enjoying it immensely so far. If there is one thing I’m still disappointed about, it’s the omission of toddlers, which I personally thought was a highly underrated life stage that could have been made so much better, but as most people hated toddlers in The Sims 2 and 3, I guess it doesn’t matter much. There are also a few omissions from the game, such as swimming pools and dishwashers, that are probably going to turn up as major selling points in one expansion pack or another, and while I suppose that’s fair enough I’m a little insulted that they’re so obvious about it. I’ve also had a couple of crashes, but once I learnt to save frequently (and you’d think after so many games they would have thought to include an autosave function, but no), they stopped completely.
With all that in mind, for the avid Simmer willing to expand their horizons, or just anyone who wants to have a go at playing with life, The Sims 4 is well worth a go. I certainly don’t regret spending my money on it.
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