Corners lock together much better than in previous generations, and it's easy enough to find and place your home furnishings. The new room-based building tools are a godsend, and it's certainly a lot easier to both throw together a basic home or fine tune a grand design. Once you've created your Sim family, it's time to build your home. The game will even lock out traits that directly oppose one another, to avoid your Sim going completely insane (unless, of course, you choose the Insane trait). You select three traits to go along with your aspiration at the start, and these are quite creatively balanced as well. This really helps you hone down exactly what you want to aim for with your Sim before you start. Aspirations replace the lifetime wishes and wants of previous games, and there's a decent amount of range and flexibility within them.
![the sims 4 mac reviews the sims 4 mac reviews](https://bluebellflora.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/ts3-site-image.png)
Sims still come with a smorgasbord of fully customisable traits and personality quirks. Physical tweaks aren't the most flexible in the business but should be more than enough to create an approximation of someone in real life. You can choose from a range of body types and a reasonable amount of clothing, and can even micromanage your Sim's gender identity to a certain extent. Modifying your character's physical features requires a pinch-and-drag motion, which is natural on a mouse but cumbersome on the game pad.Īll of this hits you before you've even finished creating your character, which is a shame because the options here are pretty good. The cursor has an odd acceleration across the screen, which is particularly annoying on the character creator. Again, this is inconsistent - on some menus, B works as it should. Where on a console one would instinctively press B to back out of successive menus, half of the time you need to drag your unwieldy cursor back up to the previous sub-menu and click on it to get back to the main game screen. "Clicking" and "hovering" have been referenced because it's quite clear that the game's control systems have only been loosely modified from the original keyboard and mouse setup. While the rest of the game's menu systems never quite reach the same low, they remain incredibly clunky in a way that just isn't acceptable. Often you'll only accidentally trigger a new tutorial because the text of the previous one is blocking your view of the menu about which it's teaching you. That one is lost forever unless you reset tutorials completely. If you happen to click on another menu item that has a tutorial trigger, you'll override the current tutorial. This is when things get really maddening. Sometimes you seem to be forced to click through the entire set of tutorial sides for one system before you can try any of it out, but other times you do seem to be able to "click" out of the tutorial box and access the game screen behind them.
![the sims 4 mac reviews the sims 4 mac reviews](https://cdn.totallythebomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/sims-4--588x700.jpg)
These are buggy, inconsistently controlled and bizarrely random in their appearance. These are difficult to read unless you sit no more than a couple of feet away from a reasonably large screen and offer only a vague description of the menu's intent. Tiny buttons bring up tiny text descriptors when "hovered" over. Everything in their design feels almost intentionally frustrating and certainly leaves the impression that little effort was put into making any of it work comfortably on a controller.
#THE SIMS 4 MAC REVIEWS SIMULATOR#
This is an annoyance in any game, but in a simulator it can be a deal-breaker. The Sims 4 has one of the most obtuse and maddening graphical user interfaces seen from a major title on home consoles. However, first impressions only take you so far, and it’s not long before you have to start interacting with the menu systems. Even the first impressions of the character creation screen are warmly familiar. The worlds are as crisp and bright as ever, and the musical score has the same bombastic cheer. If it’s been a while since you last stepped into the world of The Sims, everything about the opening and loading screens will bring a nostalgic smile to your face.