The Sims 4 Review - 2024

ign.com:

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,