Will I ever give a Sims 4 EP a good rating? I'll never know, because, yet again, another lackluster EP from EA that's not fun at all. It's aesthetically pleasing but that's all there is to it.
The new "gameplay" system is just a bunch of task lists. Want tarot cards? Task list. Want to join a group? Task last. Wanna hold a funeral? Task list. The bucket list? Task list. The active Reaper career? Task list. Help the ghost lady? Task list that only benefits one singular sim in the household. Everyone has to do it if they want the benefits too.
The funerals also function the same way as the My Wedding Stories events, meaning they don't work as they're intended to. I should have expected as such because the live stream purposely omitted showing the funeral function.
You can write wills and have heirlooms passed down through your family- oh but you can't live in the same household, it has to be separate households to work. Ghosts also have a new skill tree that fleshes them out way more than the base game... and it's ridiculous this is locked behind a $40 asking price from EA.
I can tell there was love put into this pack because the world is beautiful and the CAS and Build/Buy is lovely. But that is seriously it. It's a lackluster game pack of an "expansion". Do yourself a favor and buy it on sale or through sites like Instant Gaming.
Another Game Pack's worth of content from EA and The Sims 4 franchise. Not surprised. It adds a few new interactions and a date types (and who would have guessed? DIDN'T WORK ON LAUNCH!)
It makes your Sims love life feel slightly more in depth, but if you're a PC player, you're better off getting mods that enhance the romance/attraction system for free. The attraction system works the same way the compatibility system from Growing Together works... which is not at all. Your Sims can be completely unattracted with each other and they'll still autonomously flirt and perform romance socials with next to no rejection. It's all cosmetic text to make you think there's actual challenges in your Sims' relationships. If you want drama, you still gotta create it yourself.
There are no one-sided relationships, the relationship bar is still equal on both sides, so Sim A can't like Sim B more than Sim B likes Sim A. This pack also adds custom relationship labels that only go both ways. So that means if you wanted to make "Mother-in law" and "Son in-law" relationships, you can't. Because it will say the same one label for both Sims.
Basically, EA slightly tweaked the romance system and locked it behind a $40 paywall, instead of making it a base game update. So I recommend buying it for much less than the official site through IG if you absolutely want it.
I honestly didn't really have much positivity going into this considering I held off on buying it after seeing it caused major save corruptions for tons of players, and had bugs of rent skyrocketing over 1,000,000, with no way to fix it.
It's like a lot of TS4's expansion packs as of late, being game packs priced as expansion packs that provide very little to no gameplay changes whatsoever. You're better off buying it here on IG for around as much as a game pack at $20. Because it's not even worth $30, let alone $40.
I'm glad I bought this here for the value of a Game Pack, because whoa-nelly, that's exactly what this is, priced as an Expansion Pack. Nice to have horses again in the Sims but... it's very "meh".
The competitions aren't interactive like they were in the previous Sims title. It's a little popup box that you get to use your *imagination* to figure out what's going on, and the winning is based on RNG. You can't even build training courses for the horses to practice on like you could in TS3, they can only practice on one object at a time.
If you compare all the animal packs TS4 has to TS3, it's very sadly obvious that EA views TS4 as nothing but a Cash Cow to milk every single dollar out of its playerbase with split up packs involving specific aspects that were normally included as *part* of an expansion in previous titles.
Cats and Dogs = $40, My First Pet Stuff = $10, Horse Ranch = $40. $90 total to get only half of what TS3 gave for $20. TS4 has not included reptiles or birds in any of their animal related packs and I'm convinced they're gonna do it eventually as lackluster stuff packs or kits.
