Very disappointed when building

This review deals with my building experience, rather than with the gameplay – hopefully this will help other builders who are thinking of buying the game.

As an avid Sims fan with my own dedicated website, I was very eager to receive a copy of the Sims 4. I’m mainly a builder and was looking forward to being able to create stunning homes using what I hoped would be brand, new tools to work with. How disappointed I was!

Firstly, the foundations – If you want a foundation on your house, it applies to the entire lot, whether the parts are joined to the house or not. I sometimes like to build a fake garage or a little garden shed, but now I can’t as they all end up with the same foundation as the house! Also, you can’t make the foundation match the walls any more, you just have to pick from the feeble choices of foundation patterns they provide. It’s also very difficult to join fences to the foundations – you have to build walls where you want the fences to be and then apply a fence to the walls. However, you can make the foundations different heights, which is a definite improvement, and they can be added at any time, even if you finish a house without foundations and then decide you want them, so that’s good.

Secondly, you can’t delete floor tiles, just entire floors. I like to make my landing areas inside the house interesting and for that I need to be able to take away parts of the floor. Not any more I can’t! They say there are ways around this, but they all make weird things happen when you try them. Sometimes the roof comes down into the house etc. There is a sledgehammer tool, so you can build a mini room where you want to delete the floor, then you use the sledgehammer to smash the floor and delete the tiles, but as soon as you delete the walls, the floor comes back! I have searched for hours for a solution/workaround for this, but just come across many people having the same issue with no way around it.

Thirdly, there is NO pattern tool! You receive a paltry amount of content that you can’t do anything with, so everyone’s houses all end up looking the same. One of the things I loved about the Sims 3 was how highly configurable everything was, even the Sims themselves. This, IMHO, is a definite step back for the game. To top it all off, a lot of the objects aren’t even available until you get ahead in certain careers – what’s all that about?

There are 2 carpets, both the same colour, with little pattern difference. Unless you want to download tons and tons of custom content, your Sims houses are going to be very boring affairs. You can’t even select different bedding for your beds, you just have to be happy with the bed sets they provide.

I’m not sure if this is something I haven’t figured out yet, but if I want 3 or more sets of stairs next to each other and I want to have railings at the side, I can’t – the railings appear between each set and I can’t just add them to each end.

Annoyingly, the moveobjects on cheat doesn’t work in this game. That means I can’t move objects where I want any more. I don’t think there’s a CFE cheat, either! 🙁

There are one or two improvements that I like – one is that you can move your entire house if you need to, and now your roofs can all have different patterns.

There were several more things that I wasn’t happy with, but these are the main bugbears. For game sequels, you need to add features, not take them away! I’m just happy they listened to people and brought back the pools after doing away with these, too, initially!