izigame.me

Before this review, I feel like it's important to say that I have more than 23.7 hours in this game. A LOT more. I've got that much alone on PS4, and 500+ hours on my original origin account, which I can sadly no longer access to check the exact number. I got this game 9 years ago, full price retail, and have played it on and off since the age of 9. I've played this game to death over the years, and that's why it hurts me to leave a negative review. You can still have fun with it, and I will explain that, but it's flaws are just too plentiful for me to leave a positive review.
It would be easy to say that this game used to be great, but that... would be a blatant lie. The game was barren when it released. Key features from past games were missing, like toddlers and POOLS. How were we supposed to kill our sims now? Give them a long and happy life until a natural death? Hardly! Along with that, the map screens didn't even have colour; they were pure white, sterile places. Maybe it was supposed to be stylistic, but... I can't help but think about how much cheaper it must have been.
Slowly, over the years, we started to get more DLC packs of various tiers. It didn't start out too egregious, I wouldn't say. Sure, Luxury Party Stuff was lacklustre, but we had things like Outdoor Retreat to keep us going! Though, it was hard not to note how quickly EA had jumped to make DLC whilst the core game was missing such basic features. That isn't even to say how the community at large took the closed-world and lack of colour and pattern customisation. I'll tell you how they took it; badly. They took it badly.
With all this DLC, there was a problem.
IT. DIDN'T. STOP.
Now, it's normal for a Sims game to have a large amount of DLC. But this? It became staggering. As of this review, all of the DLC for this game will run you over $800.
OVER. EIGHT. HUNDRED. DOLLARS.
I'll let that sink in.
Have you ever wondered how this game is free? That's how. It's not like this DLC is truly optional. Some of it is, sure! But would you like your life simulator to have weather? A normal amount of clothes? More than THREE PLACES TO LIVE, ONE OF THEM BEING AN EMPTY FIELD? Then you'd best pony up! It's hard to fully express how empty this game feels without DLC. And EA knows it feels that empty, and that they can keep milking us for every last cent.
At this point, you may have noticed something, or you may have not. And that's the fact that I said I've been playing this game for nine years. And that means the game has been out for nine years now. Since 2014. This game is almost a decade old. This is an issue. A big issue. When this game first released, it prided itself on it's intelligent autonomous sims. They can multitask; like watching television AND eating at the same time! Wowzers! But with this much time having passed, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody confident to call these sims anything above 'serviceable, I guess'. Your sims will wash their plates in the bathroom! Your sims will grab water if you leave them alone for two seconds and drink until they experience bladder failure! Your sims will start a fight with their spouse, seemingly just for kicks! Your sims will stop moving until you reset them with a cheat code! Your sims will be left with an undeletable action in their queue until you, again, use a cheat code! You get the picture. This game is a mess, with problems that could be wiped clean in a theoretical Sims 5. So why don't they?
Because EA have created a live-service single-player game, and they'd be stupid to give it up.
This live-service model, piling DLC upon DLC onto the game? It's managed to cause even more issues than the game had to begin with. Each new download comes with new bugs unique in nature. Oops, there go your textures! Oops, your sims are now all autonomously screaming at each other! Oops, your Sims are BUILDING ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR OWN CHILDREN! These are the kinds of things you'll have to get used to, and this only gets worse each time they add DLC. There are problems in this game that have become support beams by this point; fix those bugs, and everything will fall apart. So they just... don't! The Sims 4 is fundamentally broken, and they won't throw the game out and start fresh, because the horse they're beating still isn't dead. Just bleeding and shambling.
This greed helped lead to the point we've reached today. Even with the uproar against My First Pet Stuff (A DLC for a DLC), it seemed enough people were content to buy such a tiny stuff pack because we got a whole new category for things just like it.
Kits. Dear lord, kits. These things aren't popular with the community, and it's clear to see why. Such meagre amounts of items might seem doable at $5 a pop, but they're adding up, and quick. Filled with lacklustre designs that only work well as a base for custom content, they're the peak of EA's lazy contributions to this game.
I mentioned custom content, so I suppose that's a horse out the stable now. Yeah, custom content is amazing. And that's because EA has no hand in it. Well, I should give them a little credit; the native mod support is an honestly nice touch! There's your first positive, EA.
Custom content is a general term for items created by the community. Clothes, furniture, accessories, you name it! With multiple dedicated sites to download it, and fan made tools that make creation easy, it's great! And by easy, I mean easy. I was making Pokemon shirts for my games at age 12. Just takes a little research. All these items come in two main styles; one more realistic (Alpha) and one to match the game's items (Maxis Match). Build up a good folder filled with gigabytes of fashion and get to work living your life in Create-A-Sim; don't forgot to buy a new SD card to fit it all in. You'll need it.
It's not just custom content that the community makes. There's also good old fashioned script mods. These have all sorts of functions; they can fix some in-game issues, add entirely new game mechanics, give you features that you always wanted (controllable pets comes to mind), and more. (More including the... infamous Wicked Whims and Extreme Violence mods. Ah, timeless classics). All these mods help breathe new life into the game and show how passionate this community can be, no matter how downtrodden by the source material.
These mods help to show how this game is actually fun at it's core. You might have read all this ragging and be baffled by my heel-turn, but it's true. Why else would I have put in all those hours? That core gameplay loop of letting your sims lead their lives is damn fun, and I can't help but enjoy it; even with everything EA is doing.
I think that others could enjoy it too if they started playing today. There is something here, at the heart of it. It's just coated in a decade of bloat and greed.
(This segment is a replacement for an old one that caused me issues, that I'm removing to keep this review safe. I think you can tell by the comments below and the tone of this review what that was, and you can take that as you wish.)
Anyway, EA can do one, and you should give Sims 4 a chance, if you like. There's good here, but this game reeks of greed and jank at it's core.