The Sims 4: Get to Work! is the equivalent to The Sims 3: Ambitions and The Sims 2: Open for Business and the career-focused DLC for the base game. It adds the Alien CAS option.

Released in April of 2015, it's the first main Expansion Pack, introducing the new monetization levels that we have come to expect from The Sims 4: it currently still retails at $39.99 albeit it has been given away for free recently. It's also one of the few Expansion Pack settling at an 'average' Metacritic score (73) and an 'average' user review (5.7).

I'll be using various reviews along with the Steam listing to help me with the pack's content since I have played The Sims 4 with all of its packs and it gets pretty difficult to remember where something comes from.

The Sims 4: Get to Work is a pack that focuses fully on career paths and the choices therewithin: its main feature is to allow the player to follow their Sim at their workplace (only for select careers) and help them get the best rating there is by completing a series of chores that are displayed once on the lot. It also allows the player to open stores through the Retail option.

The pack introduces Investigator, Actor, Scientist and the option of opening up a Retail shop where to sell... well, anything your heart desires; the content aren't unlike the ones we have seen in the past but, as I have come to understand from The Sims 4, there is zero commitment from the team to make this a seamless pack that can be used in long play of a family.

You can pick up any of these careers from the "Search for a job" interaction on the PC or on your phone and they will be flagged with a small icon on the right-hand side of their name to help you understand that this career allows you to follow your Sim at work.

For all the careers listed the gimmick is simple: you will be given a prompt to either follow your Sim to work or let them go alone. If you choose to follow them, you will be teleported (no cars, remember?) to the lot designated for their job and be given a set list of dynamic tasks to make sure you can reach that golden event status, all apt to the career you have selected: a doctor will have to perform various tasks in order to diagnose and treat their patients, an investigator will have to make an ID of the perp they need to catch and a scientist will need to make certain contraptions or concoctions. Every successful task takes you close to next run of the ladder for that particular career path and every job has its "preparation" tasks you can do in order to receive more payout from the job.

The biggest issue this pack suffers from is that the careers have no other depth than following your sim to a specified lot, babysit them for a few hours and then have them go back home. If you're playing as a single sim family, you can use the career as a filler instead of staring at your house waiting for your sim to come back; things change if you have a family: sending a Sim to a career will simply have them do an average job, which means you might not run up the ladder to get promotions. That means you will have to follow your Sim to work every time in order to get the best rank available every time, meaning that you won't be able to use or play your whole family until you get back home.

This usually means that the time commitment you give to a Sim is exponentially higher than the other family and in 2024, compounded with the other packs, it's a time consuming endeavor that, at the end, has no payoff.

I spent so long trying to get my Sim at the highest rung of the Actor career: I had her rehearse, cozy up to the directors, talk to cast mate and keep a friendly level of interactions, as well as having the important skills for the gigs I wanted up enough to land them; I got up until rank 4 before I hit a wall and, no matter how much fame I racked up through the The Sims 4: Get Famous! pack or how many gigs I could take or how many agencies I hopped and skipped around in, my Sim was doomed to stay in one of the lowest positions of the career ladder. It definitely killed my will to keep it up instead of just focusing on making my Sim famous and skipping to another job listing that didn't require me to fulfill tasks in order to succeed at it and be paid in full.

Detective isn't too different but it's somehow even lower effort: evidence you find is miscellaneous and never pertains to the case at hand, eyewitnesses accounts are chalked up to brief '[name] gave you their witness account' and the only thing that matters is getting enough pointers to have an ID for the perp, which happens moderately fast.

Doctor is a rather glitchy career: the tasks that pop up sometimes don't work due to the simulation lag, prompting your sim to just stand around another that needs their blood taken. When I said that The Sims 4 has no challenge it doesn't mean that there's no grind to be had, as Doctor - along with Veterinarian - requires you to keep making good decisions in order to become better at understanding what treatments to give to which Sim and advance in the career ladder. It's a time sink and I mean that it: you will need to accompany your Sim at work every day, forcing you to prioritize one family member over the other while the rest of the family's life in "on hold" - and, with the newest releases, it has become something of a normalcy.

Scientist is a career I've neglected because it appeals to none of my playthroughs: reading around, it's the only career that rewards you with going to a hidden world called Sixam, where alien Sims are. And that's the ONLY way to ever see Alien sims besides CAS options, whereas in The Sims 2 aliens were part and fulcrum of an entire hidden storyline and pivotal to two families at the very least - in this case, Aliens take such a secondary role in the DLC that I would have never guessed there was even a world dedicated to it, yet it does nothing to compel me to grind the ladder to the Scientist career as you cannot live on Sixam (differently from Lunar Lakes in The Sims 3) and the only upside of it is that it is a pretty world to look at, albeit barren of new activities.

The Retail option is perhaps what people were the most excited for: in The Sims 2: Open for Business the option was explored plentifully, giving every Sim the ability to run a shop and gradually become more proficient at handling their retail store, may it be a bakery, a goods shops or whatever else you might have fancied - even a small mall. In The Sims 4, the option is nearly the same as The Sims 2: Open for Business but without Servos and without the ability to open a home business, rife with bugs that have been never ironed out and with shallowness that you wouldn't expect from the 'next evolution of The Sims' - no convincing a Sim to buy what you might wish to sell or meaningful interactions with the customer, even in the wake of Likes & Dislikes, which haven't been used by the DLC to help a player land a salacious sale on something the buyer might be into (e.g. Art Deco, Lux Decor...) simply because they never made the two updates connect.

In poor words, while being the strongest DLC in The Sims 4, Get to Work falls short in nearly every aspect when compared to its predecessors.

For $39.99 you can buy (PORO'S PICKS OF THE DAY!):

• Death Stranding: Director's Cut
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

For $39.99 you can also buy:

• Manor Lords
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Stellaris
• Grounded
• Skyrim: Anniversary Edition
• It Takes Two
• Fallout 76
• Monster Hunter Rise