Because I am a particularly awful person, I started my first playthrough of The Sims 4 by trapping one of its virtual citizens in a four-wall box with no doors. This simple, horrible power has been available in Sims games for over 15 years, and I am confident in claiming that everybody who has played the series has done this at least once, if just to test the weirdness boundaries of EA and Maxis’ dollhouse-management series.

Used to be, doing this resulted in your Sims soiling themselves and swaying awkwardly until keeling over. That’s still the case, only now it comes with the added awfulness of the game outright telling you how your character feels about the predicament. Any Sim you control in The Sims 4 has his or her portrait displayed in a corner of the screen at all times, and those come with giant, white letters, and a color to match, explaining exactly what the simulated person is feeling and why.

Our test case, Ashley, turned “very uncomfortable” within a few hours of game time, owing to a mix of sleeplessness and a fetid stench; 18 hours later, she turned “desolate,” indicating that she’d grown very lonely in her den of sadness. Roughly 24 hours after that, she fell over and vanished, her body and her emotions lost to the sands of time.

Game Details Developer: Maxis

Publisher: EA

Platform: PC

Release Date: September 2

Price: $59.99

Links: Official web site Maxis: EA: PCSeptember 2: $59.99

We’ll admit, trapping a Sim isn’t the gold standard of measuring changes between the series’ entries. Still the stress on characters’ emotions stood out in that moment, and it remained a big deal for the rest of our living denizens. What’s more, there’s a real self-help book quality to The Sims 4’s emotional system. Be happy, insecure, angry, embarrassed, whatever. In The Sims 4, no emotion (with the exception of bladder and hunger issues) is bad or wrong.

This is a significant break from a series that of late has expected its players to keep close tabs on their Sims’ happiness level, and it’s a welcome one. Maxis’s first Sims sequel in five years has a bit of a one-step-forward, one-step-back quality to it. We didn’t leave our first few Sims families feeling like the experience had completely changed for the better, but we can at least say we’ve enjoyed getting in touch with our Sims’ emotions.

Ghost towns

To be fair, we are focusing on the emotional system because of how much of the game otherwise remains largely the same. Just like the prior three installments, players begin by throwing a bunch of Sims into a furnished house. The game’s main brunt is still for players to keep an eye on Sims’ living needs (hunger, entertainment, bladder, energy, etc.), manage their day jobs (or education), and find fun and productive stuff for them to do in their downtime.

Should you elect to create your own Sims and homes, you’ll have use of a few relatively robust creation toolsets that let you pull, push, and mold the premade pieces that already exist in the game. It’s incredibly easy to squish Sims’ faces and bodies to your liking, while the home-making system makes everything from basic room molding to advanced foundation sculpting and multi-story climbing feel intuitive by default.

We wish home production allowed curved walls and less boxy design in general, but we’ve already seen some very cool stuff made by the masses; a reproduction of the apartment from Seinfeld stands out. Sim creation, meanwhile, suffers from a noticeable lack of hairstyles and other accessories (which we assume will come in waves of paid DLC), not to mention the surprising inability to change any object’s color to whatever you please. Some shirts have three to six alternative designs, but don’t expect a color wheel to modify those.

If you’re too lazy to build people or a home, The Sims 4 has you covered in two ways. You can download both Sims and buildings from the game’s “community” section, which replaces last edition’s clunky web interface and inserts public creations instantly within the game, so long as your characters can afford the cost in in-game Simoleans. You can also fast forward into a pricier homestead by picking through the game’s two “towns” and resuming the lives of families who have already populated the world.

Those quote marks around "town" aren’t just meant to clarify the in-game term; they also question how town-like these places really are. The two "towns" that come pre-built in the game support roughly a dozen homes each, and they load in the game as a menu, not as a sprawling, active world. Fans of The Sims 3’s giant, sandboxy presentation will be surprised, if not devastated.

The Sims 4 really focuses its lens on individual locations, which players can hop to with a click of a Sim’s smartphone; thus, instead of running around a giant landscape, players will merely see that landscape in the distance, then use a menu to traverse it. Sims have never been the nimblest creatures, so to some extent, we appreciate the shortcuts. Still, culling back the explorative aspects by default seems a bit too much of a correction.

Eschewing hygiene for points

After moving some Sims into a home, you can easily fall into the pattern of playing in the same way as Sims games of old. You’ll only have so many hours in a game day to cook, clean, bone up on your new jobs’ skills, meet neighbors, and so on. In the case of one family we played, we never really found time to leave the house in between the constant tending to the members' basic desires.

















We made an extra effort to take other characters we’d created out of the house and around our admittedly tiny towns. At first blush, this wasn’t a revelatory experience. For starters, The Sims 4 only contains six types of destinations: parks, museums, libraries, bars, lounges, and nightclubs. It doesn’t help the feeling of variety that the last three feel interchangeable.

At the very least, these were ideal spots to focus on our Sims’ personal trajectories, since they each come with traits that players pick at the game’s outset. For example, we built a few Sims to be mean at a base level, meaning they got perks for shouting at strangers. That was more comfortable to accomplish at a loud, divey bar than with the neighbors visiting our own living room.

Each Sim also receives an overall “aspiration,” ranging from building a family to causing mischief to becoming the town’s premiere socialite, and the game will frequently prod you with tasks to help each Sim reach the next level of his or her aspiration track.

It wasn’t until we left the house a few times and found the gym that we really appreciated another mechanical change for the series: multitasking. In our game, one Sim needed to make a bunch of friends to climb the “party animal” aspiration track, a process that requires a lot of conversation with other Sims. In previous entries, that conversation time would in some sense be wasted, blocking the Sim from doing anything else. In this game, we managed to pack some conversation time in while the Sim was pumping up his fitness on the treadmill.

From then on, we found ourselves stacking tasks so that Sims could bulk up stats and accomplish goals at the same time. Sadly, a few seemingly multitask-friendly chores, particularly cooking, required our Sims’ undivided concentration. Still we were happy the feature mostly worked as expected, especially when our Sims eschewed hygiene and ramped up their video-gaming stats on a smartphone while using the bathroom.

Lessons learned from SimCity, at least!

Because we’re talking about a game published by EA, it’s fair to wonder about issues like always-online requirements and microtransactions. Thankfully, neither made their way into The Sims 4. We disabled wifi for an entire afternoon’s session without running into any incidents, other than the game asking if we wanted to reconnect when we tried loading the game’s online community functions.

You can’t use real-world cash to buy happier Sims or bigger bank accounts, although the game does come with a secondary form of currency: Satisfaction Points. These accumulate as you fulfill your Sims’ whims, which pop up as thought balloons above the characters’ portraits and routinely tie into their emotions and traits. For example, if your “geeky” Sim reaches the “focused” emotion, stick his nose into a book while he’s primed for the task to bank a few SPs.

These SPs can then be spent on short-term boosts, making it easier to socialize or accomplish work tasks for a decent amount of game time. Players can also bank the SPs until they can afford expensive, permanent stat unlocks. SPs are doled out on the regular, but not in large amounts, and the rewards they can buy are heavily varied, so the SP chase proves to be a welcome carrot-dangle on top of all the other Sim tasks you’ll be busy completing.

Thus, the core experience of paying attention to your Sims and reacting to their specific desires feels solid. It’s fun to juggle a pair of roommates, one of whom is a kind-hearted kid-lover and the other who is a materialistic, mean-spirited gossip, and have them bounce off each other without ruining your progress with either. The game runs smoothly (though only on PC at the moment), and Sims come to life with beautiful designs and exaggerated animations.

It’s just a shame that the game’s improved core, as of this review, feels trapped in a four-wall box with no doors. Everywhere you look in The Sims 4, you can see EA’s next money-making DLC/expansion opportunity, from towns to out-of-house destinations to hairstyles, pools, cars, pets, careers, hobbies, and on and on and on. If EA wants us to love The Sims anew by letting us toy with our characters’ emotions, perhaps they’d be wise not to do so by toying with ours via this very, very thin retail package.

The Good

Interesting emotional system backed by a cool Satisfaction Points economy

Multitasking means your Sims can knock out a few droll tasks at once

Home-building toolset is intuitive, capable of creating complex structures

Community toolset makes borrowing other people's creations easy

The Bad

Lack of open-world traversal makes game feel small

Character and home customization options seem thin for a full retail game

The Ugly

Everywhere you look, you'll see a place where DLC or an expansion pack would fit a little too perfectly

Verdict: Buy if you're a fan, or wait for the game to come with enough expansion content to merit a $60 price.