The Sims 4 (PC)

Sul sul. Ah, van vesua! Cummuns nala? If you know what that means, then you probably don’t need me to tell you that the Sims are back – for the fourth time since they first exploded onto the scene back in February of 2000. And talk about a phenomenon – The Sims is one of those rare games that reach a level of popularity and recognition far beyond the computer entertainment industry. The series can only be described in the superlative – the franchise has sold over 175 million copies since 2000, including two major sequels and several expansions and spin-off titles. By anyone’s standards, it’s way at the top of the top-selling series in the history of video games. In the latest installment, developer Maxis and publisher Electronic Arts have promised huge additions and changes, including a completely new system of emotions-based gameplay. So does the new game live up to the hype? Check out our review to find out. Veena fredishay!

Gameplay

It really doesn’t take long to explain the basic gameplay concept behind The Sims 4. To take the developers’ word for it, it’s simply “life”. But everyone knows that with computers in the mix, this explanation can’t exactly hold up, and things are definitely not so simple. And so it’s back to the million-dollar question – just what kind of game is it?

The Sims 4, like all of the games in the series, is a life simulation, and while that might sound as dry as an advanced course in biology, Maxis has turned it into an extremely entertaining and original premise for a video game. It’s a gameplay concept that thrives on the potential for absurdity in everyday life, but also a lot more.

If you want to make something like a life simulation into a viable game, the first thing you need, of course, is something whose life can be simulated – a Sim. The game starts with the Create-a-Sim system, where the player can design the Sim of his or her choice. How old is your Sim going to be? What’s their body type? How do they dress? These are the kind of questions a lot of you might be able to answer right off the bat. But there’s a lot more – What’s is or her basic behavioral pattern? Is your Sim going to be a go-getter or an unmotivated bum? What do their hopes and dreams look like? Would he rather be a ladykiller or a sports star? This is where The Sims 4 offers a huge variety of options to help you design the Sim you of your choice.

After you create your Sim, it’s time to move into your new home. Life doesn’t take place in a vacuum, but in a spacious and highly social environment. The Sims 4 offers you two options for move-in day. You start off with a certain amount of Simoleons, the in-game currency, and your first option entails buying a home and furnishing it. Even here, you have a wide variety of options; from the simple to the extravagant, from petit bourgeois to feudal lord. And just like in the previous games, if you just can’t seem to warm up to any of the pre-built domiciles, there’s always Build Mode, where you can build your own dream home, including front and back yards and landscaping. Build Mode in The Sims 4 differs from its predecessors in one significant way – the only thing you have to pay for to start with is the lot itself. After that, whatever you design, build, and furnish will only affect your budget in terms of upkeep later in the game. Another new feature is that you can add pre-designed rooms. Whether it’s a kitchen, a living room, or a balcony, there’s a huge variety of rooms to choose from if you’re the kind of person who just doesn’t feel like you can trust your own interior design abilities. If you want, the rooms can even come fully furnished. Whether in good taste or bad, it’s really all in the eye of the beholder.

From there it’s right into life in all its fullness. Sims live, work, and interact with one another, and this is where the new features promised by Maxis come into play. The Sims now have individual moods and feelings. In previous installments, they were driven by what you’d call basic needs – hunger, comfort, fun, energy, etc., but in The Sims 4, emotions play a major role. Sims can now act in accordance with feelings such as love, fear, confidence, and anger, which also affect how they interact with other Sims. And this is where the “absurdity” I mentioned before comes in. Two Sims like each other and go on a date. If she has fun playing computer games the whole evening while he enjoys watching sports on TV, the date’s a success. And if Mr. Sim really wants to charm his way into Ms. Sim’s heart, he can try dancing alone behind her while she stares at the computer screen.

Now, one thing that’s a little bit more like real life is the new multitasking feature – just like in real life, Sims can carry out several different tasks at the same time. You can give them a series of tasks using the redesigned context menus, and they’ll do them either at the same time or in the order that makes the most sense. Watching TV and having a conversation with a friend at the same time? No problem. Simultaneously cleaning the house and calling for the children? Done. However, a lot less realistic is the Sims’ ability to find their way around – there seems to be some kind of problem with the path-finding logarithm. Just having the whole family sit down at the dinner table for once can degenerate into minutes of waiting for everyone to find their place and sit down, as the game can’t figure out who’s going where and who’s sitting in what chair.

Now, “where there’s light, there’s shadow”, the old saying goes, and unfortunately this also applies to The Sims 4. Maxis claims that the game engine has been completely revamped, and that’s nice, but one thing you’ll quickly notice is that they got rid of a lot of the features from parts 1 through 3, and this includes certain features that had acquired many fans over the years. Even when you design your Sim, you’ll notice that you can’t choose a particular style (no “Create-a-Style” system), but simply build your Sim from scratch using the palette of preset colors and shapes. The game world, where you could once move about more or less freely, is now divided into smaller sectors separated by loading screens. And speaking of moving, it seems The Sims 4 has inadvertently invented teleportation. Cars and other modes of transportation no longer exist – instead, Sims just disappear into this air and then reappear at their workplace. Fans of the series have listed more than 89 features that have disappeared between The Sims 3 and The Sims 4, including features that have become synonymous with the series, like the burglar, the repo man, and ghosts. There are also several minor issues that nevertheless go a long way towards spoiling the fun when taken all together. For example, if you drop a plate on the ground, you can’t pick it up, and your Sim who works so hard to maintain a nice home will now get in a bad mood every time they see that plate on the floor. And it seems the only way to solve the problem is to move to a new neighborhood.

Graphics

The Sims 4 has the same kind of colorful, stylized graphics you know and love from the previous games. And while The Sims 3 was a huge drain on most systems, the new game has things back under control. Sims, pets, objects, buildings, and landscape are portrayed in a familiar style that mixes cartoonish abstraction with life-like simulation, and this doesn’t stop with the little peculiarities like animal-shaped topiaries. But wacky details like these are what gives The Sims its special charm.

Despite the significantly reduced burden on your system compared to the previous game, The Sims 4 is just as full of detail, though it runs more smoothly than its predecessor. It’s quite possible that the main reason the game performs so much better is that they nixed the open-world environment, and with it the number of characters and objects to be simulated at the same time.  What would you rather, load screens or lag? I think this is something everyone’s got to decide for themselves.

Sound

As usual, the Sims express their feelings, opinions, observations, and questions in Simlish, the artificial languages created for Sims to speak. There’s only one (admittedly clichéd) word for this: sweet. Elsewhere too, the world of the Sims is once again filled with music and sound effects. Whether it’s the radio playing in the kitchen or the shower running in the bathroom, or the “count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two” game in the bedroom – everything has the right sound effect. The background music is also good, like in the other games. It’s not exactly going to climb the pop charts, but it definitely fits right in to the overall feel of the game. And of course, like in previous game, you can play your own music in The Sims 4.