![]() The Sims is just as much about chaos as it is leading your Sims through life. Creating Sims with negative personality traits, like jealousy or mean, can make those situations even more fun. If a neighboring Sim is irritated, warming up to them is challenging. The emotion system also makes for better interactions between Sims. Seeing my Sim’s mood flare as she had to clean and fix one household item after another after a long day of work was too relatable. Aside from visual and Create a Sim updates, the biggest advantage The Sims 4 has over its predecessor is the multitasking and the emotion system that make the Sims’ responses more realistic. And there are still no cars, which is a strange thing to leave out of a life simulation. Visiting a museum and only being able to walk in front of, but not into the bar next door without loading is jarring coming from the big, seamless neighborhoods of The Sims 3. Create a Sim also comes with the better and more inclusive gender customization with options, like choosing whether your Sim can get pregnant or if they wear masculine or feminine clothing (though The Sims 4 could generally use more clothing, accessory, and hair options with its base edition to make up for the lack of support for community-created mods).Meanwhile, there’s a laundry list of issues that have haunted The Sims 4 since 2014. Curing a toddler's rage is stressful to other Sims, but taking care of the tots (and sometimes playing as them to wreak havoc) present a fun challenge. Their personality traits greatly determine their demeanor, almost more so than the adults, and identifying what keeps them happy early on is crucial. Toddlers do add another good layer of difficulty, as they are so dependent on their caretakers and require micromanagement from you. “The console version of The Sims 4 does at least come with all the free added features from the past three years, including toddlers, pools, dishwashers, and other features that it was called out for omitting on PC in 2014. While all of these issues may not be isolated to the console version of The Sims 4, I certainly experienced them far more consistently than I’ve seen on PC. Even moving around the lot too quickly can result in a small hitch. Audio and animations sometimes get out of sync when fast forwarding, and loading into a lot or into build mode can take a while and sometimes starts with dropped frames, especially in locations that have a lot of furniture or Sims. That happened in my first hour and a half of playing.The Sims 4 also has plenty of other general performance issues too. The Sims 4 did seem to run a little better on PS4 (though I did play far more on the Xbox One), but I still encountered a menu bug that prevented me from closing it without completely restarting it. I also inexplicably lost an in-game day of work when my game refused to save. Then there’s also the issue where The Sims 4 can’t decide which menu I’m in. Other times menu descriptions and pop-up notifications would randomly stick on the screen for long periods of time with no way to close them. Sometime my Sim’s skill bar would hang overhead and wouldn’t go away until I loaded into a new area or reload my game. “The biggest issue I’ve had with the console versions, though, is the bugs. I would have appreciated a way to change the speed of the cursor, though. ![]() It takes awhile to get used to navigating the menus, but pressing the left thumbstick for a quick control guide reference made learning them a bit easier. Original developer Maxis and console port developer Blind Squirrel Games make an admirable attempt by using the View button/touchpad to toggle between two sets of controls: the menus that border the Sim world are one set, and all in-world actions are done with the other set with a cursor. Even so, I did stay up embarrassingly late playing on a few occasions because building and guiding my Sims’ lives is still fun.The Sims 4 first launched on PC in 2014 ( read our Sims 4 PC review), and the transition from mouse and keyboard to a controller for the console version comes with expected challenges when condensing all the functions into so few buttons. ![]() That is just one of the many small but constantly aggravating issues I had with The Sims 4 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It was tense for a moment there: I nearly lost a few in-game days of hard work. After struggling to get the cursor to select the “Save” button in the foreground menu instead of toggling between my Sim’s aspirations menu in the background, I somehow finagled a way to save my progress.
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