Sims 4 New Entertainment

The inaugural version of our review section and this time we're looking at the Sims 4. A quick bit of housekeeping before we talk about the virtual game: we won't be doing scores at the end of our reviews, mostly because we think picking an arbitrary number to stand in for an entire series of hopefully well-considered opinions feels wrong. And also because it’s much easier for us to just say whether you should play a game or not. So that's why this section is called Play or Nay.

So let's get down to business, is the Sims 4 worth playing? Well, let's start with this: do you have a family? Do you have a husband, a wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, kids? Do you have friends? Do you sometimes smile at the woman who makes your coffee in the morning? Have you ever had contact - physical, emotional or otherwise with another living thing? If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, then congratulations you have a life, you should play it. Because The Sims 4 is basically that, but the people in it aren't you, so you care about them a lot less.

The Sims fulfils a lot of the nesting, voyeuristic and sadistic needs of the modern human in one handy package. It's kind of this human zoo where you guide a band of little people through their lives like a benevolent god or turn spiteful and kill them all by setting their houses on fire- like actual god. For this latest entry, EA and Maxis have smartened up the some of the systems. For one thing, Sims now have emotions, just like all real humans except David Cameron, so some days your Sim will just wake up grumpy for no explicable reason or be suspiciously jubilant - they're probably having an affair or something.

It's a simple twist to the established formula that means that while you won't see your Sims curled up in the corner wracked with existential dread like the cynic in you when the volatile emotions of your Sims are thrown together. But it also creates this interesting dynamic between what you want your Sims to be and what they feel like being. Sims can also multitask, which means that all the crap stuff like exercising or actually taking a crap can be done at the same time as something else.

The major issue with The Sims 4 is that it's buggy as hell and really lacks polish. When it crashes and you lose hours of progress it's not so charming anymore, it's no longer a web activist, it's just needs to answer questions to the Swedish authorities. So the long and the short of it is, should you play Sims 4? Well if you've got a little bit of patience to weather the rough patches and you have an overwhelming desire to watch a bunch of pretend people eat and sort of babble at each other, then you should probably just watch Celebrity Big Brother or you could play the Sims 4 if you like.