Review Of the Sims 4- From A Lot Creator's POV
I will start off by saying if EA meant for this game to be easier for the average player to build lots, they have succeeded and failed. There are some nice features that make building lots easier, such as the different shaped room and having the ability to resize rooms once they are in place. The rounded porches/balconies are a nice touch. My favorite feature is the roof tool and the ability to resize and choose different colors for different parts of the roof(this has long been a complaint of mine about the other sims games). **BUT** they do not have a octagon shaped roof to go over the octagon rooms. I am truly befuddled by this and as I create mostly Victorians and Castles I am quite annoyed.
There are other nice things, such as being able to place windows and curtains at different heights, but let’s talk about terrain paint and the over-all cartoonish look of the exterior of the homes. The terrain paint just looks wonky to me, it doesn’t look good at all.(I have a high end gaming PC, so i am sure it’s not my graphic card) Not to mention that the horrid controls for moving around the lot (camera controls), make doing anything a chore if you can get to the angle you need.
Controls, the UI, what a lovely mystery mess if you do not know where things are located. And don’t try to edge scroll where the UI is as it won’t let you. I found this out the hard way and I have noticed many people complaining about edge scrolling not working! Oh, it works, you just can’t do it if the UI is in the way. Maxis/EA should fix this asap.
The lack of lots that are empty and not knowing how to bulldoze the ones that are pre-made. It took me two hours of building and accidentally clicking on something whilst in build mode in order to figure we can bulldoze the lot. There is a little house icon towards the top you can click on that has an option to bulldoze lot, but you have to be on the lot to bulldoze. Wouldn’t this be so much simpler to do from the world screen much like every Sims games? Who really plays the horrible Maxis pre-built houses anyway?
I hated the tutorial part when you first open the game. You had to go into Create A Sim and well, create a sim. Plenty annoying as I don’t actually play the game and could care less about the tutorial phase. **But** there is a light at the end of the tunnel, go to Simsvip and she explains how to shut this off in origin. Otherwise you will have to complete the whole thing before it shuts off.
In buy mode there are some items, I seem to remember some lamps that you have to be at a certain level in a job to unlock. WTF? I guess I will never use those lamps as I don’t play the game and don’t see myself doing it in the future.
Last but not least, I see no way to share the lots with the exception of the gallery in game. Just what I wanted, my creations floating around on the Sims 4 exchange and no possible way to save them to my computer. This is by far the biggest annoyance to me, the whole reason I buy the Sims games is to create houses. I am beyond annoyed.
Over-all there are certain things I like about the game and there are other things that I cannot stand and I hope EA will fix these items.
EA Staff (Retired)
