The Sims 4 - PC/Mac

No toddlers? Thank you, Maxis! It was always so irritating to deal with babies and toddlers so much that it was ALL you were doing and your Sim spent all their time meeting all their needs. Very realistic for sure but I did that in real life and I play games for fun not reality. I always just ended up aging them up to a child as quick as possible.No pools? They were nice to make your property cool and pretty. But having your Sims swim in them was about as exciting as watching your Sim bicycle across a big open world map to work.But anyway let's focus on the fact that this is Sims 4 and not Sims 3. A new direction. The create a sim is really great and easy to use. I love the cartoonish style graphics. I do admit I miss the ability to create some crazy outfits using all the patterns and the color wheel but I can manage without it and actually spend a lot less time creating my Sims and more time playing the game.I was nervous about a loading screen everytime my Sim changed venues but it is just a few seconds and is so much better than the waste of time of watching them travel or wasting all their energy running somewhere. Like I said I am a casual gamer though.The whole interface seems a lot more crisp and clear. I like the whole emotions idea and how it gets me to play my Sim based on how they feel at the moment. I don't have to of course but it is much more fun than always playing just to meet your needs or to increase skills or get a promotion.Oh and my favorite part that got me stoked about Sims 4 was when my Sim was double fisting a milk and a coffee while watching tv and talking to his friend. It could only be better if he was holding two beers :) The multi-tasking is a great feature. I haven't seen it yet but I sure hope my Sim can chat with someone on the phone while sitting on the toilet.This is a fun game. Give it a chance**I wanted to add that while I like the emotions, they can tend to shift around very quickly at times. Maybe my Sim is just overy emotional...or nuts :P***Update: After getting some more playing time this weekend I will add some new things I enjoyed about the game and even some issues I had.I really enjoyed the fact that you can bake your own cake for your birthday party. I had to learn this through my own research however after searching through the items list for a birthday cake and finding nothing. I also really enjoy that you are given goals to accomplish to make your parties and dates better. It always irritated me in Sims 3 when you were given a bad party or date rating and had no idea what you did wrong.On that same note I like that you have goals to help gain promotion at work rather than just boosting skills related to your job and going to work with a good mood. In my tech job, I have to do things like "mod a game" and I think it is very cool that I can work on job related things while chatting with house guests or even send someone a text. Also I think Sims 3 simply had a smiley face to represent your job performance. Sims 4 gives a much more clear progress bar on how things are going at work and this seems to change pretty accurately based on how you perform out of work tasks and the way you choose to work when you get there. Work hard, take it easy, leave early, etc... I didnt notice this option at first. It is a bit difficult to notice at first. Not sure if I missed it in the tutorial but i figured it out eventually.Not sure if this is good or bad but depends on your game style I guess, but it seems like there is no noticeable affect for being late to work. If my guy is supposed to be to work at 9, he usually doesn't even leave until 9 and sometimes if I'm doing something, he doesn't even leave until 9:30. At times it seems like time flies by while at work, almost to the point you forget to adjust how you want to work that day. Other times it seems to go a bit slower like in Sims 3 and I wonder if that is related to the fact that I am clicking around looking at things. Also I noticed that you can't check your needs or click ahead on what you want your sim to do as soon as they get home while they are at work. I don't really love or hate this but it is a noticeable difference.I had one major issue where my son had started a sim and took my sim to the gym with him. When I restarted my game, it started at the gym but I couldn't find my sim or click on anything. I gave up on it slightly angry and quit the game. When I went back to it later, my sim was back in his house with all of his needs at 100%. Also I had a ton of friends i didn't know about and some of the chicks I was hitting on were now elders. Not sure how well it works having 4 of us with different families in the same sim world and playing at different times but I know we didn't have that option in Sims 3.

I hate to feel like the only one saying this, but I really like TS4. I have played all sims games since the beginning. Yes, I miss a lot of the elements that people are complaining about, but this is a brand new game. There will be a ton of features added through expansion packs.The number one complaint I see is that you only load a small part of the world at a time. So, if you want to travel to the museum, for instance, you have to endure another loading screen. To me, this is a HUGE POSITIVE!! The loading screens never take any longer than a minute on my computer and that's much better and more tolerable than the 6+ minutes TS3 took to load!So, on the rare occasion that I want to send my kid to the park to play on the monkey bars there, I will sit through a loading screen.The game also has some really fun features with your aspirations and your career goals. Things are broken up into milestones and you have to meet certain requirements to pass the milestone and work towards the next step in achieving your goals. It's very fun to have these little tasks to do.Also, emotions are very fun to play with! I wish it was a little harder to manipulate emotions, but I'll take what I can get! I love how your sim will have different interactions available when they are in a certain mood. Going to school focused also boosts a sim's performance! I've found this to be a fun feature to play with. My sim also got pregnant from a random guy who was walking by her lot one day. So, I moved him into the household, but when he proposed she denied him (for some unknown reason, but if I had to say, I think it was because of his terrible facial structure) and he died of embarrassment right on the spot. Then my sim proceeded to get chummy with the grim reaper and still calls him sometimes! There was an achievement flashed on my screen for befriending the grim reaper!Now, onto building improvements! As a primarily live-mode player I really don't care too much for building fantastic homes. I prefer the quick and simple and my goodness does the new build mode cater to that! You have new features which allow you to choose from many premade rooms and just plop them onto your lot. You can resize them as you please. Then, you can also just decide to pick up and move the entire room on a whim, or you can move your entire house! It makes adding and editing your sim home so much easier. The only thing I truly miss is the auto roof. It might still exist and I just can't find it. Also, pressing F4 while in game brings up a menu where you can browse user created content. There are already so many beautiful homes, rooms, families, etc already waiting for you to use!Yes, it is a bit sad you can't build swimming pools, yet they put a lot of effort into making fountains elaborate. Do I get it? No... But I see an outdoor living (or some similar name) expansion or stuff pack coming out in the future with this option. How many players out there even used their pools? My sims never went swimming...And maybe you will miss being able to turn off floor elevation restraints and using terrain tools to make these crazy homes. I don't miss that stuff because I was never a master builder. What I do know is the master builders out there are still finding a way to make amazing content.It's a great and fun game, so I'm not sure why everyone is giving it all the bad reviews. If you all were expecting a clone of TS3, then why don't you just stick to TS3?