The Sims 4: City Living (2016)

The Sims 4: City Living is the fourth expansion pack released for The Sims 4, retailing at the price of $39.99. Its purpose is to bring the mechanics of city living - apartments - in The Sims 4 in the same manner as The Sims 2: Apartment Life and The Sims 3: Late Night. The expansion pack was released in November 2016.

The expansion pack boasts a couple of new things for your Sims to do: cultural festivals to attend in public plazas, three new careers (Politician, Social Media Guru and Food/Art Critic), adding also a new neighborhood - San Myshuno - and the ability to own an apartment.

Let's start from the careers: the three/four careers presented are simple, no-rabbit hole careers, they do not really have much bearing on you or your life and they can also be done from the comfort of your house, offering no difficulty in either pursuing them or going along with them.

The cultural festivals are fine - there's very little to say about them: they're immersive enough and if you ever want your sim to be out and about with friends doing something, they're a decent activity more so as of November 2016, where activities weren't exactly as big as they are in the later stages of The Sims 4.

But let's talk about the two itchy arguments of this Expansion pack: the new neighborhood and the apartments themselves.

San Myshuno is supposed to be "the city" part of The Sims 4 and is pretty much represented as such: the graphics ae barebones and only showcase a very weirdly spaced out city where single buildings (such as the open-mic bar) are basically isolated and standing among high-rise buildings, giving the impression that they couldn't squeeze all of the activities they wanted in the penthouse they developed.

Most of your sims will live in apartments: a building that is singular to only few areas (Britechester - University Life, Ciudad Enamorada - Lovestruck and San Myshuno - City Living) and cannot be built everywhere, differently from The Sims 2: Apartment Life but more closely resembling the penthouse functionality that The Sims 3: Late Night offered.

Different from its The Sims 2 counterparts, apartments can only exist at fixed points in the building and are bound to the confines of the "fake" building they are placed on, with its usual fixed size: you cannot have an entrance, you cannot have a multi-story complex where multiple apartments are on multiple floors, you only get one floor and what apartments you can squeeze into that small space. Penthouses, instead, occupy an entire top floor of a "fake" building and can be also a means to collocate a community lot. Both style of buildings need to have an elevator guiding your sims from the bottom entrance of the fake building up to where their apartments resides.

The mechanics of an apartments aren't too different from a regular house: you simply pay rent every x days, your neighbors can be noisy and disturb your sleep if you put the bedroom next to the shared wall and that's it. Nothing much else than that.

If we put it into perspective with the mechanics of apartments in The Sims 2: Apartment Life, The Sims 4 pales in comparison as its predecessor's predecessor allows for multi-story buildings with different house plans, the ability to make semi-detached houses and have clear boundaries while The Sims 4 struggles to even come up with a system to make apartments more interesting than what they are, making it hard to choose one unless you're doing it for the story sake.

This has been rendered absolutely useless with the new expansion The Sims 4: For Rent, which allows you to do exactly what The Sims 2: Apartment Life allowed you to... minus the elevator bits, as well as being able to own a set of apartments as a landlord and collect rent from the people living in there.

This expansion pack wants to encapsulate elements from The Sims 3: Late Night, The Sims: Hot Date and The Sims 2: Apartments Life and The Sims 2: Nightlife while doing none of them too well or particularly in depth, in order to be able to further sell you another expansion pack that will do the trick for another $39.99 a bop.