I was really excited to play Sims 4: Get to Work especially since Sims 4 itself wasn’t quite what I expected – a graphical upgrade but a gameplay downgrade from Sims 3. It just so happens that recently I have been on a bit of a Sim-Fest spending most of my free time on the mobile versions of Sim City Build It and The Sims Free Play. When Get to work popped on my desk, I was ready to well, get to work.
First things first, I always take my time building my Sim. Getting just the right hair, clothes and… um body shape. Then, it’s building my dream house… it’s also about the time I get reminded why I’m not an architect. And jumping back to the desktop right off the mobile version also means that moving the camera around isn’t as easy as a pinch and swipe of a finger.
This is also about the time I realised that my dream house isn’t going to materialise from the merger amount of Simoleons (Sim currency) I have in my bank and the only way I can get my dream bedroom and pay for the lights is to get a job–don’t you just love it when you can’t run away from life’s realities… even in game.
But getting a job is what this expansion is all about. Where your sim would once just disappear for work, you now have the option of following him/her to work–that is if you decide to be a Doctor, Detective or a Scientist.
Each career choice has it’s own promotion tree which you can climb up by completing assignments at work. Think of them as mini quests that you gotta do before time runs out and you clock out of work. The more assignments you complete the faster and higher you climb up the career ladder.
For me, I was immediately attracted to the ‘Doctor’ career. But of course, you start at the bottom of the food chain and your early quests are all about admitting patients and taking swabs or giving them jabs for the llama flu. Initially I did NOT have the best of times. I was clumsy and didn’t quite know what machine did what and where… hello rookie at work. Just as I thought I got the hang of it, times up and it’s time to go home. I got the hang of it the next couple of time though and I got my first couple of promotions fairly easily.
I tried my hand at the Scientist and Detective jobs as well on other Sims and while the gameplay is similar, I found the Doctor the most rewarding. I’m not really looking to catch the bad guys and looking for aliens as a Scientist isn’t my cup of tea–I blame the Crystal Skull (yes Han, I mean you).
The Sims 4: Get to Work has got me playing my Sim differently though. Now I actually care about her condition before it’s time to go to work. I make sure she gets her hours of sleep, takes a good shower and cooks a nice meal before heading off to work. This means that I sacrifice quite a bit of social time and I can’t hit the nightclub as much as I would because the last thing I want is to turn up for work with a Sim-hangover.
Without proper rest and conditioning before work means that you’ll probably need to grab a bite, or crash wherever you were last standing, at work taking up precious time and keeping you from attending to your tasks… and there goes that promotion and new goodies.
Performance wise I didn’t have too much trouble running it on my retina iMac–I had to lower the graphics settings though. Playing it on a PC with a REAL graphics card meant that I could turn up the graphics and still get decent response. I did get quite a bit annoyed with the audio popping and crackling–it was subtle but I couldn’t help but notice… especially since the machine is rigged up to studio monitor speakers.
All in all, the Sims 4: Get to Work adds some much needed content and makes the Sims world a whole lot more like the real one… for better or for worse.