Editor’s Note: Alongside the release of The Sims 4’s Lovestruck Expansion Pack, we are taking a fresh look at the base game in 2024, replacing our original review from 2014. You can read more about our review policies and philosophy here.
Innovative Gameplay and Enduring Legacy
In 2014, while wearing a cardboard plumbob headband I’d hastily made the night before, I lined up at a local game store to pick up my pre-ordered copy of The Sims 4. With a create-a-sim wardrobe full of Pinterest-friendly fashion items and a host of then-modern appliances, The Sims 4 felt like a cutting-edge sequel at launch, one that reflected those simpler times. But what’s even more impressive is that now, almost a decade of updates later, it’s still the benchmark life simulator, offering a profoundly unique household sandbox that’s yet to find stable competition. Its aging sense of style and sometimes archaic systems do mean The Sims 4 cannot coast on this legacy forever, even with an admirable free-to-play pivot back in 2022. But with a collaborative network of community tools and a world of chaos at your fingertips, The Sims 4 maintains itself as an Imagineer’s dream nonetheless.
Playing Life’s Creator
As Dr. Frankenstein so famously found out, recreating life is full of complications, and The Sims 4 leans heavily into the mad scientist fantasy of it all. It provides you with all the tools you need to build a bespoke world full of customized people who have hopes, dreams, and occasionally questionable haircuts. By distilling the human experience into a pool of malleable metrics, you get the opportunity to play god with families of those virtual avatars, guiding them as they travel the peaks and valleys of life, from birth to death and everything in between. While The Sims 4 certainly could have taken the punishing route of finicky and overcomplicated systems, it instead carefully balances the complexities of human life in a surprisingly approachable manner.
The Sims 4 Gameplay Screenshots (2024)
Unique Personalities and Interactions
Beyond staying on top of their immediate biological needs, like toilet breaks, sleep, and hunger, there are aspirations and fears to contend with, as well as bills to pay, careers to nurture, and social lives to spin. Your omnipotence gives you the unfettered freedom to mess with the citizens of your world, and it’s entertaining to haphazardly graft the frenzied whims of your imagination onto the lives of its inhabitants. Whether you wield this power for cruelty or kindness is entirely up to you, and the fact that most of your larger goals are self-driven (like levelling up your music skill enough to become a rockstar, or finding your Sim a loving soulmate) makes it fun to simply play around however the mood strikes you.
Creative Building and Design
You can choose to use a variety of pre-made families or design a custom household using the Create a Sim toolset. As with humans, Sims are a complex combination of physical presence and personality, and I love that this DIY process allows you to make granular choices that will set each one apart from the crowd. Pairing up personality traits is a minigame in itself and allows for a cast of uncanny characters to take shape in front of you. A hot-headed genius might fly into a rage when they don’t find the time to play a game of chess, whereas a career-driven hopeless romantic could run into difficulties when perfecting their work-life balance. This enticing pick-n-mix process extends into a Sim’s likes and dislikes, with the quirks often playing out in strange and comical ways. A budding virtuoso could be made to cringe at the sound of a guitar, and it’s these small but meaningful interactions that add lifelike depth to these avatars.
Potential for Improvement
Unfortunately, there isn’t equal subtlety when developing your Sim’s physical appearance, especially by the standards of contemporary character creators. There’s a decent pool of predesigned facial features to choose from, with a more curated appearance achievable by pushing and pulling at a handful of anchor points to sculpt your Sim’s anatomical features. Even so, I was happy to see that I could at least create a diverse range of body shapes through its sliders and sculpting capabilities.
Limitless Creativity
The joy of building isn’t just for personal properties, either, as you’ll also be able to take a stab at commercial real estate. Where cash flow is the antagonizing force when building your Sim’s personal home, public lots instead require minimum furniture and amenities to fulfill their duty. It’s a process that keeps you accountable while gently guiding you away from making useless, lackluster locations. The Sims 4’s sandbox mission statement is always in frame, though, and you can easily ignore the rules and get weird with it anyway.
Community and Expansion Packs
If learning the ropes via happy little accidents doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, another pair of useful post-launch additions are the tips system and scripted scenarios, which can both help smooth over The Sims 4’s sharp edges where necessary. Not only a boon for newer players, these enlightening systems do well to get veteran players like me up to date with the many small-but-impactful changes that have arrived in free updates and paid DLC over the years.
To that end, I would be remiss not to mention one of The Sims 4’s most prominent assets: its strong community of players. There is a library’s worth of user-generated lots and characters to take inspiration from or graft into your game, often only a Google search away. Years of community ingenuity have also spawned a manufactured ‘hard mode’ that presents you with hyper-specific tasks to complete if you’re searching for more complex scenarios.
Immersive Sound Design
Another consistent companion across The Sims 4 is its dazzling soundtrack and expressive sound effects, something the series has long been lauded for. Relentlessly optimistic and impressively orchestral, the score’s blend of string, woodwind, and percussive instrumentals offer a comforting backdrop to the building menus and loading screens you’ll spend hours staring at.