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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. It’s certainly no Dragon’s Dogma 2, which admittedly isn’t a huge surprise when The Sims 4 first came out just two years after Dragon’s Dogma 1, but it is noticeable in 2024. 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.
Once you’re finished molding their form, your Sim will also need a wardrobe for the many situations life throws at them, from working out to bedtime to fancy dinners. Sadly, most of the clothing options and hairstyles in The Sims 4’s base game now feel ripped from a 2010s fashion magazine rather than any modern catalog. While skinny ties, plaid overshirts, and gauche graphic tees were welcome at launch, there hasn’t been a significant update to the default outfits across The Sims 4’s 10-year lifespan. That issue leaves long-term players stuck between spending cash on costly couture-focused DLC packs or relying on fan-made mods to achieve an acceptable fashion sense. That said, there have been some free additions to Create a Sim that are worth celebrating, such as the introduction of medical wearables like hearing aids and glucose monitors, as well as a choice of customisable pronouns and romantic boundaries for your Sims.
If you thought people management was The Sims 4’s only draw, think again. As well as a god, you’ll also become a city planner, able to tinker with the architecture of your community across three separate biomes thanks to a comprehensive construction kit called Build Mode. You’ll balance financial costs, health and safety, and style to realize your grand designs, no matter how absurd they may be. A rooftop toilet might be an eyesore for the neighbors, but if you like your restrooms with a view, The Sims 4 isn’t going to stand in your way.
Not only can you flex your creativity one wall, window, and staircase at a time, but you can also fill your creations with esoteric bric-a-brac like encased scrolls or a collection of creepy gnomes. And if your building skills peak out at hastily crafted mountainside Minecraft homes, the approachable toolset and submenu of ready-made rooms allow you to quickly leave your mark without needing a degree in architectural engineering – though having one certainly would help.
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. However stifling the Create a Sim can feel at times, it’s made up for by the meticulous tools at your disposal in Build Mode.
But just because you can build something silly doesn’t mean your Sims will always be happy about it. For instance, while constructing a cheap family home in the desert locale of Oasis Springs, I cut corners on bedroom furniture to save money – a choice that really didn’t gel with the high-standards that were baked into the personality of one of its occupants. That decision led to a rampage of arguments with relatives thanks to their sour mood, spoiling relationships and threatening the fate of the household. Ultimately, I was sent back to the drawing board to clean up the aesthetics to avoid watching my Sim’s social life fall to pieces over mismatched lamps.
This is just one example of how The Sims 4’s systems cleverly intermingle with one another, providing an unpredictable sandbox with so many reactive dynamics that delightfully get in the way of your best-laid plans. The ensuing chaos from such cataclysmic social events also acts as an organic jumping-off point for new stories to grow, leading you down scintillating rabbit holes you may not have been expecting. You have enough control to guide your Sims where you generally want them to go, but you won’t always be able to brute force their lives into perfection, and that mitigates the boredom that can come with getting everything you want all at once. (Although there’s nothing wrong with turning on a few cheats and playing without restriction when the mood strikes you, too.)
Perhaps you want to curate drama on a broader scale than just your household? Well, The Sims 4 has an answer for that, too. A relatively recent addition to the base game is Neighbourhood Stories, which allows you to influence the world by adjusting ambient life changes for the Sims across your map without having to directly play as them. Career changes, accidents, and having children are all aspects of real life, and through this process, the families scattered across your game can continue to thrive (or not) without you. While loosening my grip on every individual element of my Sims’ lives was an uncomfortable shift at first (and one you don’t have to make if it doesn’t suit you), it’s great that this tool allows Sims to flourish around your primary households in a more organic way.
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. There’s a smart balance here that maintains a universal approachability by holding your hand when you want it to and letting go when you’re ready to take a risk.
Speaking of DLC, 10 years of developer support has left The Sims 4 with a copious amount of themed expansions, with options based around things like seasons, university, magic, and, most recently, dating. This is par for the course for this series, and the quality of these packs is generally top notch – but even with the base game becoming free-to-play, it’s a shame that some paid add-ons now feel like essential parts of the Sims experience. Adding pets to your household or having a more active role in your career come across as fundamental features that should be available to everyone. I get that this has become the business model, but it’s especially frustrating to see intrinsic human experiences like holiday festivities or the ability to create cliques locked behind a paywall.
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. These Nuzlocke-esque challenges cater to all kinds of players and can involve anything from building a home with minimal square footage to, my personal favorite, attempting to make your Sim have one hundred babies in their lifetime.
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.
