The Sims 4 (2014)

This is really tricky to rate, because everything is brought down by the inherent predatory nature of EA's microtransactions and pricing tactics.

The base game itself is hollow, soulless, and corporate. Basic content that was always available in earlier games is now parceled out in sectioned DLC and 'kits' that cost extortionate amounts of money and will only give you a piece of each previously-complete category of content - for instance, Sims 3 gave you Pets (which included cats, dogs, horses, foxes, small animals like hamsters, all of the furniture and items for pets, etc). In comparison, Sims 4 gives you Cats & Dogs, then a separate DLC for Horses, THEN a separate Stuff Pack for My First Pets Stuff for furniture and items. They sell a DLC for their fucking DLC.

If you download a ton of custom content, creating Sims is as fun as ever. The graphics are a step up, and it makes it (unfortunately) difficult to return to older Sims games after getting accustomed to this one, but everything else is a huge step back.

Once you've created your Sim, it's pretty much just empty repetition. You have to make your own fun via legacy challenges, mods, etcetera.

So: my rating is not for what the game can be with your own additions and downloaded custom content, because then it's what you make of it. I am rating it as it is vanilla, which is, frankly, barely anything at all.

Pirate it. Genuinely. At this point, pirating EA games is almost less ethically questionable than funding them and allowing their practices to be worth continuing. If they don't get their shit together, I can absolutely see the Sims franchise being run into the ground, which would be a sincere shame.

Now, I know. I KNOW. The millions of expansions. The obvious cashgrabs. The Sims 4 invites understandable frustration from the people trying to break their way into the system. EA is, of course, a hellish corporation. We are on the same side.

Let's take a step back. The Sims 4 was released in September of 2014. Since that date, the very same game has recieved 10 years worth of updates alongside 10 years of expansions. When I first played TS4 in 2014, it felt barren, empty and strangely polished. Nobody was certain where this venture was headed, and many returned to the highly developed TS3 instead. For those of us who waited, we hankered for the thing which would eventually invite the game's most damning criticism: the expansion pack.

Fast forward to March 2025. TS4 has four different types of purchasable content: expansions, game packs, kits and stuff packs. Expansions introduce new worlds and central mechanics which change the way the game is played, in addition to new content. Game packs are similar, but considerably smaller in scope, and the same can be said for kits. Stuff packs only introduce game items.

Are these additions overpriced? Absolutely. Yet are they also nigh impossible to compare to other in-game purchases? Absolutely. With each new game-changing expansion, each add-on interact seamlessly with every other possible combination of game mechanics one might have. Adding livestock to the game isn't just a question of how sims might interact with them, but a question of how they interact with dogs, cats, seasons and rentals. With all the expansions considered, the game reaches a level of complexity that I have never seen any other game come close to. What's more, with the base game often popping up for free, the expansions are the product, and they are best enjoyed one by one.

Now comes the time for full transparency. I own all of the Sims 4 content, save for 5 game packs which I find annoying, 3 stuff packs and almost all of the kits (I have never paid full price for any of these). I also have 1,400 hours in this game. The decade that I have spent playing TS4 has been bumpy, frustrating, and genuinely fulfilling. This game is its own artform, in a way, honing visual creativity and narrative storytelling, and I can say with complete honesty that there remain many, many things I am yet to have experienced. What's more, I am glad about the expansion packs.

"Glad about the expansions? The microtransactions?! Are you crazy? And you call yourself a communist?" Well, to start with, I don't agree with the 'microtransactions' label on TS4 - there is no way to pay for limited or temporary resources. Everything you buy, you own. At the end of the day, I can sell my EA account for quite a sum if I were to decide to give TS4 up for good. Additionally, the truth is that, within our capitalist hell, these expansions enable genuinely passionate creators to continue working on the game, long after its release. There is no MMO, nor pay to win in TS4, and within TS4 social communities, creating builds and sims with limited packs is unique, appealing and interesting content. The target audience for extortionate prices are hobbyists with disposible income, not socially dependent addicted players.

This game has indeed been growing alongside players for ten whole years. Trans sims, polyamorous sims and two whole new life stages are all now part of the base game. On the ten year anniversary, the team finally patched in a way to label sinks, so that sims would stop going to wash up plates in the bathroom. It's a small example of the kind of perpetual improvement this game would not have were it not financially lucrative.

I love The Sims 4. I love creating stories. I love creating legacy games, and watching adult sims move through the world while I remember when they said their first words. I love building places for my sims to live, and I love when things go wrong. My save file is a personally constructed exercise in understanding how people's lives can turn out so differently.

So, should you go grab all of the expansions right now? No, of course not. But if you wait for a sale, and free up some hard drive space, you might find yourself taking a first step into a genuinely incredible world. Ah, wait - still no cloud saves? Fuck it. 1 star.

I had to scrap this review so many times because I don't how to write this but with the latest news that we are going to be stuck in Sims 4 hell 4-ever (ah ah, thanks LGR for the pun), it's a good time as any to do a small retrospective on the DECADE long journey this mess of a game has gone through.

The Sims 4 was as anticipated as any other main title of The Sims's franchise: the series is beloved and has had many games in its portfolio, ranging from PC to Nintendo DS and Playstation - all of them containing different gimmicks to do the most with the constraints of using another platform.

Suffice to say, the newest Sims entry in the main line of the series had the potential to be groundbreaking considering The Sims 2 and The Sims 3's accomplished release series yet... it wasn't.

It released to lukewarm reception: as per usual, the game starter with a blank slate, setting itself up for a re-release of the more famous DLCs we came to expect (seasons, super natural, owning a business, apartments... so on and so forth) but what caught everyone by surprise is how it was missing crucial things from the past games.

Pools, toddlers, basements, genealogies, family trees and much more was completely absent from the game (tinfoil hat but it was clearly because they wished to release pools with the SPA/Pool dedicated pack and toddlers with their Generations pack, for example) as well as the game looking... already old.

The Sims' looks were unappealing and the CAS looked lackluster considering we went from having sliders (and mods to add onto them) in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 to using drag&pull mechanics to adjust a Sims' face. It took time getting used to it and even then, the results were... okay but not exciting.

Create-a-style, perhaps The Sims 3's most praised feature was completely gone, limiting clothing choices to 3 to 4 swatches of extremely upsetting colors and patterns.

The game itself was a cold milk on a winter's day: aside from being buggy in all of its interactions, the game felt empty. The neighborhood choices were two, both of them with fixed lot sizes and no way to either increase the number of lot present, change their size or do much but bulldoze and re-build them; the screen itself was pitiful, bearing a flat 2D 'corporate art' look to the housing choices.

The gameplay was linear but somehow it lacked the challenge of past games: whereas in The Sims 2 or The Sims 3 furniture made a difference (such as making the room more pleasant and increasing your needs), now it only made a difference if you had the specific snob trait. Cheap mattress? No problem, your sim will still get more than enough sleep to make the work day a walk in the park. Cheap toilet? repairing it isn't that much of an issue if you flag that your Sim likes to repair to stuff but even without it, it still is very unlikely that you will fail. Needs decay is slow, painfully so, and the game is resistant to making your Sims die, money isn't particularly an issue and with ever rising amount of DLCs it has become increasingly clear that there are way too many ways to do a Rags to Riches challenge without fluffing it with unnecessary micro-management and money spending.

With the excuse of "cleaning up for a neat release" we have had to put up with incessant bugs, simulation lag and stutter and every DLC adds upon it in a way different than the one that came before, adding more bugs, more stutter and more processing lag, leaving your Sims to stare at a wall for a minute before phasing through it.

With the recent revelation that this is what we're stuck with, this retrospective is not going to get more gracious with time. While the modding choice is okay (the community rivals only FFXIV's modding scene, infested with drama-mongers, some modders loading their mods with malware and doxxing people that give them money and the catalogue being rife with paid options), every mod adds to the payload this engine already struggles to deliver - yet, they are the only thing that makes the game worth playing for more than an hour at a time.

I'll probably review this at some point. My thoughts are a bit scattered on this and I need time to collect it but I wanted to put this out while I had it in my pocket.

Overall, The Sims 4 has reached similar levels in terms of creative freedom that the previous games had, and surpassed them in many ways. It's also the only mainline Sims game that doesn't perform like crap on a technical level, most of the time.

Sure, it's lacking in some ways compared to the previous entries; you can't really modify your sims' cities or buy a car and drive it around the open world, but the amount of things you can do is really broad IF you own all the expansion packs. And this is where it gets complicated; because I did not pay for the Sims 4. I use a cracked version with an integrated updater because I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for a business model that targets people that pretty much exclusively play The Sims 4.

Sail the high seas for that one and don't feel bad about it.

As a complete and ever expanding service, it absolutely allows you to unleash your creativity and invites you to create the most unique and goofy stories that can play out in literally infinite ways.

Eu não tenho muito o que comentar, eu só joguei para platinar mesmo. The sims é um jogo que eu gosto, mas impossível de jogar em console, o controle é extremamente horrível, jogo trava e reinicia toda hora.

Só voltaria a jogar no computador mesmo.

Por falar em platina, estava sem nenhuma vontade de jogar, então eu só abri a galeria de personagens da comunidade e peguei um personagem pronto, onde peguei cerca de 90% dos troféus de uma vez só, e os que faltaram, fiz em menos de um dia.

I was given The Sims as a gift around 2001 and I've been obsessed with the series since. I was completely addicted to The Sims 2 for years, didn't get into Sims 3 but now my Sims 2 game is so buggy that it's kind of unplayable. The UI and building and getting around is also pretty clunky compared to the updates. So, basically, I'm left with Sims 4 being my only option for Simming.

I have all the expansions and DLC because I'm a slave, and still the game feels like it might as well be vanilla. The emotions system is nice, but ultimately the Sims lack uniqueness so the traits and emotions never really come together that nicely. Everything is too easy and clean, it's really hard to accidentally kill a Sim or for everything to start going terribly wrong. What I love about the Sims games are the family dynamics, the genetic systems, growing and raising a Sim/family from rags to riches. I like a slow grind, but unfortunately this is not what these games really provide; especially The Sims 4.

The graphics are nice and a marked improvement over the other games. The genetics blend together a little too well, so all the Sims are just too pretty and plain compared to Sims 2, but I hated the pudding face Sims of Sims 3 which is why I never played it. The UI is beautiful and clean. Building feels great, I never liked building or decorating in the previous games but it's really nice. It sucks not having a lot of customised options and too often it feels like nothing really matches. I have to use a lot of CC and mods to make my game feel a little more dynamic, but even then there's still something missing.

It might seem like I'm being overly negative for a game I've rated 4 stars but it has a lot of frustrating problems despite still being enjoyable and the game I easily play the most (with 1100 hours racked up so far, Sims 2 probably beats it out but I haven't played it in years due to game breaking bugs). As much as I can complain about all it's lacking, I still keep coming back to it. It's fun and relaxing and feels good to play. I love building and creating houses for my Sims, and I like the management elements (though again, lacks complexity and difficulty).

The "emotion" system makes every sim behave/wish similarly, with little regard to their underlying traits. Combine that with the closed world and the absence of CASt, it's fun for the first 20hrs or so, but very boring thereafter, even with Get to Work, Spa Day, and Outdoor Retreat installed. That's too bad, because the graphics are nice, if plastic-like, and the searchable catalog is great. Multi-tasking is also a good feature--when it works...

I've gone back to Sims 3, and will revisit Sims 4 in a couple of years, once more expansions/patches/mods have been released.