Okay, so time to complain.
Create-a-Sim
The CaS editor is very cool and it uses a sculpting system that's easy to pick up and adds a lot that the older games were missing, especially in facial detail. Though, in what they've improved they've also fucked up. The number of styles supplied is almost nothing and you can almost smell the DLC. There's about 10-15 options for each category (hair, facial hair, tops, full body dresses, pants, accessories) and if you're luck an article will have anywhere between 3 and 10 styles. This is in lieu of the Create-a-Style thing for Sims 3 which was really fucking balling and let you easily get all your furniture matching.
Also, if you saw my screenshots, there's this monkey lip syndrome that I can't figure out how to deal with. It's worth mentioning because the rest of the editor is so spot on but the lips completely fucking ruin it. They remind me of the dA guy who only drew anus mouths.
User Interface
Abhorrent. I have nothing positive to say. They go for a clean, minimalist style and fail completely. Every element fades and it takes a good second for you to be able to move on to the next thing you're doing. The Tutorial is from fucking hell. There are literally hundreds of prompts that it litters all over the place and the only way to get rid of them is to do the thing they're asking. The actual, official way to disable the tutorial is to exit the game, open its properties, and add a fucking executable argument that the developers use for the next time you launch the program.
The menu does not scale in size relative to the resolution of your monitor. On my 1920x1080, the text is microscopic, buttons are hard to click because they're so small, and I feel physically ill after 15 minutes of playing because I am 3 inches from the screen trying to read shit.
Camera
Also fucking awful. The biggest change that drives me insane is that edge panning is painfully slow to begin with, then quickly accelerates. There's no option for panning speed or edge sensitivity, there's just a checkbox to enable it. It takes 5+ seconds to move an inch in any direction, so you're constantly moving your hand off the mouse to use arrow keys.
Graphics
I'm a huge fan of the art style. I like games that can be cartoony and I feel it matches the old games well. It also carries the big advantage of being easy to render.
At least it should. I have a fucking $4000 laptop that can run any game I've ever purchased on max. Except The Sims 4. I have to run it on bare minimum to play the game at above 20 FPS. I don't know why. I have nothing more to add. It's disgusting.
Gameplay
Dunno where to start.
There are 2 town with like 6 lots each. This is all you get. There's a few ghetto places, two nice places, and two palaces each.
There is no overworld anymore. To travel between lots you need to use your cell phone to dial "Travel", and then after calling something you enter the overworld and can send your sim to another lot. This is Sims 2 type shit.
Conversations take place in what should be a natural way. You can do it while jogging, sitting on a bench, with multiple people in a big standing group, etc. This actually works quite well until I made a diva that only existed to piss off people. Negative conversations are carried in the exact same way as positive ones. My diva went over to a man, introduced herself rudely, and then they took a seat on the bench so that she could yell at him. See the attachment.
There also seems to be less shit to do. The game is engineered towards letting people live vicariously. It's aimed at lonely 30+ year old women with no children, and 16 year old girls with no impulse controls. Managing moodlets, getting to the top of your career path, achieving level 10 in a skill and not getting murdered in the process. I mean there was a lot to do to strike balance and while I didn't play the game for that long I didn't really get a sense of wanting to do anything. To achieve your sim's lifetime wish, you are given a list of tasks. For my diva, this was making 3 enemies and doing 25 negative social interactions. To complete my task, I cellphone'd myself to the park and started screaming at people on a bench, until I could punch them to make them my enemy. I did this in under a few in-game hours, and my reward was 50 points and another list, which were the same things, but three times as many. I don't know what the points are for. I assume they're some kind of lifetime rewards program a la Sims 3, but I couldn't find the menu.
Don't buy. Pirate if you're curious.
