This is my favorite game that I can't recommend. I love this game, as my playtime will tell, and I will continue to pour more hours into this game. I'm not giving a negative review because of the game's "fun factor." It's very destressing, it's chill, its difficulty is all in the hands of the players. The modding scene is great, and the creative possibilities are infinite. On paper, the Sims 4 seems like the dream game. A perfect game that even people who have literally never touched a game before in their life can pick up and play. In reality, EA has erected a massive series of walls that you have to scale to reach that state, and this is the crux of the review. The ultimate problem is, and is the whole reason I'm giving this a negative review, is recommending people to buy this game because of the aforementioned walls. To say that they have become untenable is an understatement. They are nigh insurmountable at this point.

The first wall, and this is the point where most people stop at, is the pricing. It being free-to-play as of October 18th does not save this from being HORRIDLY expensive through DLC cost. The base Sims 4 with no expansions or packs, makes the game EXTREMELY limited in scope as to what you can do. Want to be a spellcaster? Want to attend university? Have cats or dogs? Have changing seasons in the weather? Form clubs? Get famous? Have a job? That's ALL locked behind DLC that is either the same price as the base game, or, get this, DOUBLE the price of the base game. All those things I listed? Those are SEPARATE DLCs! If you were to not get them on sale, it would run you a couple HUNDRED already! And this just getting started. On the store page, as I'm typing this right now, it lists 56 different DLC, and to buy them all in one fell swoop costs just short of a THOUSAND dollars. Nobody in their right mind should make that investment, and I can't be of the mind to tell someone to spend that much on a single game.

Now, to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, this is only as bad if you buy it when it isn't on sale, which the game goes on quite frequently. Deep sales, in fact! Up to 75% a lot of things, which bring down the price for everything by a couple hundred dollars. In fact, with the Summer Sale that's coming up as of the time of writing this review, this game will most likely get significant price slashes. However, to counter that point, the asking price is still SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS. The prices become more manageable, but it is still a SIGNIFICANT investment. More of an investment than, frankly, I think this game deserves. And considering how Sims 3 with everything still costs such an outrageous amount, it would seem that those prices aren't going anywhere for the time being.

If a high asking price was all that kept people away, I suppose you could argue the point that not recommending a game you like because of pricing is silly. That if you put hundreds of hours in like I have, the price is "worth it." Perhaps that argument would have grounds and I would entertain it, if not for the fact that the game in of itself just fundamentally DOES NOT WORK with everything combined. These are the other walls, and this can become overwhelming for the inexperienced. Even if you buy everything and you jump in, the Sims 4 is a strange program that seemingly randomly decides to brick itself every so often, without you even really being the cause of it. There are so many bugs and glitches that have no fixes for it, merely ways to temporarily relieve of you of it, much like ibuprofen for a headache. And they aren't the silly, funny glitches seen in Skyrim.

For example, randomly, the game will begin to run under 30 frames after exiting build mode, and you solve it by merely pausing the game and unpausing it. Not a terrible bug but it's pretty much the epitome of the problems I have with this game: everything is just player made solutions rather than an official bug fix. It will happen again, and instead of just fixing it, EA just tells you what you can do to help yourself with it. You'll be doing this often, spending hours looking up some obscure error, through no fault of your own, because either Sims 4 randomly decides to brick your Resources.cfg after update and makes it impossible for you to play with CC of any kinds, or your anti virus somehow marks this entire game as potential ransomware, or the Sims 4 randomly just corrupt your save file and you're trying to figure out how to fix that. And that's just on the meta side of everything.

File headaches aside, the game itself just acts wonky as well, adding its own walls to scale. A cursory glance at the reviews for the DLCs illustrate the absolute nightmares that spawn with these additions, but I'll share some of the errors I've had on my end. I've had multiple instances where I tell a Sim to fulfill their hygiene need and their immediate first instinct is to...run out and clean a solar panel? In place of just taking a shower in one of the MULTIPLE showers that exist in that house? I tell them to fulfill their energy need, thinking they'll go to bed, and they'll either randomly decide to back float in the pool, or drink an incredibly irresponsible amount of coffee, like a third shift worker going off of only three hours of sleep. Fixed all of this by manually telling them what to do. I've also had moments where I couldn't wash laundry because the game bugged out my washer and dryer, where the prompts for washing never came up. Only the prompts for putting the dirty laundry in and taking the dirty laundry out. Fixed by selling the set and then buying another. I've also had my weather permanently glitch itself into never changing at all. Where it snows all through winter and all through spring, causing me to have to buy a weather changing device in game and use it. Sims will randomly drop whatever they are doing to do some unrelated task, such as stop cooking to randomly mold some hunk of clay sitting in some corner of the room. Sometimes, my Sims will also stand still with the "chat with (sim)" action in the queue, but then never actually chat with that person,, for whatever reason, causing them to bug ouit and need them to be reset. The list goes on and on, and I think you've gotten the point already.

Again, these are fixed by just manually selecting actions, using console commands, and removing the bugged items in question. I know what you're thinking. Why are you complaining about bugs that have an in game solution? The issue is, again, that this is just player solutions for problems that aren't being fixed. You're paying hundreds of dollars for this game and the DLC. You'd expect a level of polish to behind this, but there isn't. Players shouldn't have to actively fight against a game they bought, only to find a bunch of band-aid, player made solutions a because the FEATURES IN GAME THEY PAID HUNDREDS FOR DOESN'T WORK AND EA DOESN'T DO ANYTHING TO FIX THEM.

It's all the same hackneyed excuse of "there being so much in this game" and sounding like they are some small game dev studio. All of this frustration after the ludicrous pay wall is just simply unforgivable, and to recommend people this game knowing the hours worth of troubleshooting and fixing I've had to do is like to encourage self destructive tendencies. I made the investment, I bought the steam edition to make a review. I sunk a lot both in time and money, and have got to a point where I can say I enjoy this game, perhaps through Sunken Cost reasoning and Stockholm Syndrome. But it required me having to scale multiple walls and slaying multiple beasts to get there, and that's just simply not a journey for everyone. I cannot look at someone and genuinely tell them to make the same investments I have, nor do I think EA should benefit from having people do so.

Edit: Also having Origin become a MANDATORY download that has to get loaded EACH time sucks.

Edit 2: Sims 4 is now free to play, but my thumbs down remains.

It isn't often that an RPGMaker game leaves such a profound effect on me that I sit and think about it months later after completion. This game definitely enraptured me, and getting 100% completion on it actually made me sad, because then I didn't have any content left to continue playing for. The title, in my opinion, does not do this game nearly enough justice. I thought going in that this was going to be a wacky, "so random xD" style of game, and coming out of it, it nearly made me tear up with how much the story beats resonated with me. It's genuinely such a charming little game, and the world Ponett builds in it is incredible. Most games, I tend to go right by the NPCs and the world, thinking nothing of it. This game had me scouring every area for every bit of dialogue, and was genuinely surprised when it changed with the flow of the story. It's incredible.

It's not without its faults, of course. While I totally respect wanting an open and beginner friendly style of game, and indeed, it helps this game became accessible to gamers of all skill levels, I feel like there isn't enough challenging gameplay and difficulty tweaking to really satiate those seeking a challenge. Which is a shame, because a lot of the gameplay mechanics are very interesting in concept, but in my opinion, they aren't fully utilized in a way that brings out the most of it. A lot of cool gameplay ideas come and go, and by the end, you end up doing what happens in most turn based RPGs where you are just repeating a pattern that works on every encounter. Which is a shame, because the potential for some truly creative combat is there. Some of the most exciting bosses in the game are ones that either disable party members or offer a "time limit" of sorts, and sadly, they tend to be single boss only gimmicks.

Aside from my gripes about the gameplay, this is a game I can truly recommend to most people as a wonderfully written, cute RPG game with a lot of "real" feeling and hard hitting commentary that, at least for me, was pretty life changing to behold. Thank you, Ponett, for this wonderful game, and I am excited to see what you bring in the future.