Entire household stuck, game gets stuck on loading screen on exit

So just got the Sims 4 today and the minute I started playing I've experienced issues that make it basically impossible to play.

These main issues start approx. 5 mins into playing:

• Lose control of speed function (1,2,3 don't work. Initially using the 'P' and 'Esc' shortcuts people suggest works but after a while it can't even be changed with the mouse).
• Sim will freeze on whichever action they're doing (started with the 'cook' part of the tutorial). My Sim's very healthy apparently because she's been eating salad for the last 20 minutes straight... 
• Have tested moving lots as well and saving in different areas but when I visited the Museum the same error occured and I noticed all the other sims were frozen doing one action as well. 
• Time continues during this problem and needs are still affected / time limit on emotional things still tick down. 
• ^Similarly, music continues to play, slight animations for each sim still continue. 
• Usually occurs after trying to cancel an action in the queue to do something else, but sometimes happens indepedently.

I thought it might be graphics card issues as when I first opened the game it said "Your video card is not recognised so we've selected the highest settings blah blah".

I've done the following things to try and help but they haven't achieved much:

1. Updated the driver for my AMD Radeon R7200 series card.
2. Play with Origin offline, disabled the tutorials via --no_tutorial or whatever, have also disabled Origin in-game 
3. Changed graphics settings from Ultra to Low 
4. Restarted the game multiple times
5. Changed the font size to 125% as some suggest (Windows 7)
6. EDIT: Have just tried the resetSim cheat and this left the sim standing with her arms out, unable to be moved even with cheat Shift controls or teleportation :S

I'm effectively playing on a new desktop computer with a more-than capable graphics card so really wondering what's going on here. I did buy the game from ozgameshop but was told this was still a legitimate means of buying it so maybe that's a problem but I'd hope not.