izigame.me

This pack is pretty disappointing to me - not because it's buggy or unhelpful, but because the whole thing was not thought out well.
The first thing of note is that the magic system is horribly balanced. I can't stress that enough. The first spells you're likely to learn are some of the best ones on offer. The first Mischief spell you'll get is pointless (though most of the spells in that school are more for roleplay purposes than actual use), and pretty suitable for baby's first spell - making another sim sad is the kind of silly, inconsequential effect you'd expect as a tutorial, right? Well, the first Untamed spell lets you burn down somebody's house. The first Practical spells let you completely ignore Hygiene and the Repair skill. And the first potion recipe you'll get tops out all of your needs for the price of a single apple, which you can find growing wild in most neighborhoods. You get four of these for one apple. I'm not saying it was impossible before this to have a sim that could just fish all day, but it took over 30,000 lifetime aspiration points to do that. You can make a new spellcaster, move them into an empty lot with an apple tree and a cauldron, and they won't need anything else to exist.
And it's not really uphill from there. There's some cool later-on spells, like teleportation or spawning food or immunity to aging, but most of the magic tree is clutter - potions that make negative interactions stronger, spells that give other sims bad moodlets, spells that tidy up a single plant in your garden. One master-level spell lets you teleport back to the Magic Realm, which is completely useless because spellcasters start out with an inventory item that already does that. And then you have a few more balance breakers, like duplicating items or bringing sims back to life (which is something you could already do, but the spell replaces a long writing aspiration journey or a top level cooking recipe with rare ingredients with a simple click of a button, and that's kind of the flavor of the whole pack.)
You also get a free copy of a potion when you read its potion book, which gets downright silly when it comes to one-offs like the Potion of Immortality. You never actually need to hunt down ingredients - just learn the recipe and bam, you're immortal. Whenever one of my low-level spellcasters get cursed, I just get a spellcaster who hasn't already read the tome of Curse Cleansing to read it and pass my sim the free potion. I almost never have to actually brew potions, which... is supposed to be the reason potions aren't spells? I think? It doesn't seem like this is the way the game was meant to be played, but again - this pack just makes everything in it way too easy.
The charge system is built up as a risk/reward, but it doesn't function well as either; the power increase doesn't affect most spells you'll actually use (you can't really improve instant effects like duplicating an object, teleporting, or object repair), and you more or less have to be deliberately trying to kill your sim to actually die from the risk factor. It almost never seems to actually kill you the first time you max out charge, firing a warning shot at you instead, it's hard to actually max charge without getting nonlethally blown up and reset to 0 in that 66-99% range, and if that wasn't easy enough, the progression tree immediately unlocks a perk that lets you drop your charge on will, allowing you to continue to cast as many spells as you want. Curses end up being scarier than death, and curses are just nuisances that you can't do anything about until you reach a certain spellcaster level, whereupon you can instantly get rid of them for free and they functionally stop existing. But they're at least something.
This is all pretty slapdash compared to the Vampires dlc, which has a similar progression and level system, except the stuff you learn at first is weaker than the cool stuff you get later, the really strong and game-changing stuff is at the top of the tree, and the risks and penalties involved with the life state don't make it a no-brainer for every single sim you play.
The Magic Realm itself looks incredible, but like the rest of the pack, it's very style over substance - a big, flashy space that has very little actual stuff to do in it. Duels sound cool until you realize it's just the same animation with no input or variance depending on what spells the sims know. Wands are completely aesthetic; brooms and familiars are only the barest step above that and have no interactive features. Learning magic boils down to a very brief fetch quest, then coming back every few hours and asking three NPCs for a spell and recipe until you eventually have them all. You might have to come back even more times to collect all wands and familiars, but they're all functionally interchangeable. (If you have Cats and Dogs, there's at least a level of interest in being able to bind an existing pet as a familiar, and they have slightly more functionality there.) And even though it's already been established that there's basically no need to ever obtain potion ingredients - even if there was, there's no trouble obtaining them either because they're all on sale at the Magic Realm too. Which is a shame, because the time you had to spend combing the world for rare collectibles tempered both the powerful effects and the moneymaking potential in Sims 3 version of magic - and speaking of which, the Magic Realm just lets you buy certain complex harvestables like dragonfruit and death flowers that will break any sense of progression for a new family, spellcaster or not. You can show up to Glimmerbrook, pay 1k for an item to plant, and then earn thousands a day and functional immortality without ever having to join a career or anything.
It's just not very well thought-out, and the whole thing is a bit painful because you can really see a potential that wasn't carried through. The bones of something awesome are here, but only the art department put in any legwork. Which is... sadly kind of expected for the Sims 4.
It's a great pack if you like playing with cheats but feel like hitting ctrl-c is too much effort. And it's alright if you just want to roleplay your sims as witches and wizards. But if you like game balance and having to work for your goodies, this probably isn't the pack for you.