Console gamers aren’t used to dealing with this stuff. It appears from EA’s technical forums that I’m not alone. Worse, I’ve had saves across two different games fail to retain several hours of progress, with both manual saves and the autosave affected. It looks great and the Sims AI holds up really, but over a few days of play I’ve had the game freeze once, crash twice and the UI get stuck without the pointer on three occasions. These are legitimate criticisms, but what’s more frustrating is that, three years after the PC release, the Xbox One version I tested still doesn’t quite feel ready for release. Without the expansion packs, already emerging for the console versions, The Sims 4 sometimes feels like a ‘starter edition’ of the game, but one that you’ve ponied up a full game price for. When your Sims go to work, they seem to disappear into another universe entirely – something addressed in the PC’s Get to Work expansion pack. Not only do the neighbourhoods feel less like part of one town, but they seem shorn of amenities and life, with only a handful of places to hang out in in each, and no bookstores or grocers to frequent. In come smaller, if busier, areas that are linked by map screens, with loading screens every time you travel between them. Out go the coherent, open-world settings of the third game, with their bustling public areas and residential zones. I’d actually forgotten how much The Sims 4 felt like a step backwards from The Sims 3 in terms of its neighbourhoods. With practice and a few adjustments to the view, you will get better, but some of the biggest, most creative pleasures of The Sims 4 on PC aren’t quite as creative or pleasurable here. Too often you’re fighting the camera, struggling to remember how to access functions, wondering where the pointer has disappeared to and trying to do things with a level of precision that the controls can’t quite deliver. However, navigating these with a controller, not the conventional mouse and keyboard, can be tough. The Sims 4 has the best home-building, furnishing and decorating tools of the series, not to mention great character creation and customisation tools. Sadly, where you feel this most is in one of the best bits of the PC original: Build Mode. Maxis has done its best with different control modes, context-sensitive controller maps and useful shortcuts, but The Sims 4 still feels awkward. Selecting Sims or objects in a hurry, picking dialogue choices or choosing from menus feels clumsy, like you’re trying to handle a complex task with the wrong tools in hand. Moving the pointer around with the left analogue stick, while controlling the camera with the right, doesn’t really become a familiar action even many hours in. On the PC, The Sims 4 wasn’t exactly short of menus, modes, selectable objects, icons and buttons to navigate, and – much to its credit – Maxis hasn’t dumbed things down for the console release. Inevitably, the biggest challenge is the controls. ![]() It’s a game that’s one-part frustration to every two parts fun. If you previously played The Sims 3 on PS3 or Xbox 360, you can expect to have the same love/hate relationship with The Sims 4 that your PC-gaming compatriots had before you. ![]() The result is a game that still has much of the magic of the PC original, but with its failings magnified and a few new ones thrown in. The new console versions of The Sims 4 don’t quite drag us back to square one – the toddlers and swimming pools remain – but it comes pretty close. Content that was missing from the first release – including a toddler stage of childhood, swimming pools and swimming costumes – has been introduced through free updates.įour paid expansions and a range of downloadable add-ons have made a game that originally felt sparse seem much richer and more interesting, albeit for a sizable investment on top of what was already an expensive game. It’s taken over three years for The Sims 4 to make the move from PC to console, and in those three years a lot has happened to the PC game. The Sims series is part of the larger Sim series, started by SimCity in 1989.Turn to page 2 for our original PC review from 2014 Each successive expansion pack and game in the series augmented what the player could do with their Sims. Players can either place their Sims in pre-constructed homes or build them themselves. The player creates virtual people called "Sims", places them in houses, and helps direct their moods and satisfy their desires. ![]() The games in the Sims series are largely sandbox games, in that they lack any defined goals (except for some later expansion packs and console versions which introduced this gameplay style). Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, Java ME, BlackBerry OS, Bada, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, Android, Windows Phone
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