The Sims 4 review

 Rating: 7.5/10 - ‎Review by IGN - ‎1 Sep 2014

 New to the series, the Sims display a range of emotions which influence your variety of decisions in the game. Emotions give you new choices that impact your Sims and shape their stories. You can now control how your Sims engage other Sims, objects and individual moments in the game. You control the brain, corpus, and now the heart of your Sims. The Sims you generate are full of life and are defined by, among other things, their unique personalities and their varying emotions


There's a blithe naivety to the way that life is presented in The Sims that is either comforting or a little disturbing depending on your mood. The series is softly apolitical in the way that a Barbie house is apolitical, and by that I mean that it isn't apolitical at all. The Sims is loaded with assumptions about the way that people function and about the way that success in life is gauged, but it feels churlish to point them out because it's all just a bit of fun, isn't it. The Sims is set in a world where buying things is always awesome and everybody is twenty-five until they're sixty. Regardless of environmental aesthetic, the series has always been functionally and fundamentally Californian.



The way they interact with each other, the way they can eat, watch TV and chat about underpants or spaceships at the same time is a marvellous technical achievement that puts the rest of the game, with its missing pools and open worlds, into context. I wish we could have it all in the same package – perhaps The Sims 5 will – but for now, I’m happily and frankly unexpectedly willing to trade those bells and whistles for characters that feel, well, real.