For years players have built houses, built families, built memories, and taken tabs on how many ways there were to kill their Sims. From starving them to drowning them to seeing them grow old and die of old age, fans everywhere have stretched the limits - and possibly given an outlet to the secret sociopath hidden inside them - in every installment of The Sims that has arrived on store shelves.

So when The Sims 4 was announced and the beautiful previews filled with promises of new features were released one by one, people started to get excited. Fans were looking forward to yet another installment of the well-loved franchise. But did EA Games learn their lesson from the reboot of Sim City? Did they upgrade from The Sims 3 or are they finally back peddling to a game that turned out to be an incredible flop? I’ve been an avid player, and killer, of The Sims franchise, and like other fans, I was incredibly excited about The Sims 4. But after just a few days of playing, I’ve gone back to The Sims 3.

When I booted up The Sims 4, first impressions were good. The music was crisp and beautiful; and the soundtrack for The Sims 4 really is beautiful. It takes everything we’ve known from the franchise over the years and built on it. From the music, to the sound effects, to the small quips after a failure, Maxis has really stepped it up a notch when it comes to the audio. The voices and the babbling words of the Sim characters are clearer then ever. It doesn’t disappoint on the visual front, either; with those visuals I was greeted with are the smoothest, cleanest graphics seen in a Sims game yet, retaining the style we’re all familiar with but taking things up a notch with additional detail, improved lighting, and sharper textures.

I started off simply enough. I was determined to dive into the new and improved character creation, and I’m pleased to say that the customization is incredible. The new tools mean that for the first time you really can create a character exactly how you want, and doing so is easier than ever before. You can adjust the position of their eyes, the size of their eyeballs, and everything else simply by clicking and dragging the mouse rather than fiddling around with the sliders. It’s a more immediate way to sculpt your Sims, and that’s precisely what it feels like you’re doing - sculpting digital clay. Hell, you can even give your character a hunch back and big feet if you desire.

You can also pick their walking animation. Want your character to lumber about like a neanderthal? You can do that. Perhaps you want them to swagger about town like a John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. You can do that, too. It’s clear that the Sims themselves are the focus in the latest installment, and Maxis has taken the time to ensure that you’re able to recreate your virtual self (and admit it, you know that’s one of the first things you’ll be doing).

After making myself a rather happy looking family, I began to look at the traits. I couldn’t help but to wonder where they all went. The choices you’re given for traits has been literally cut down to a third of what was available in The Sims 3. No longer can you pick between your favorite colors and foods. Sure, they mold better with your character and give each character a quirky attitude fit for each of them, but it still feels like there could be a lot more to make each Sim your own. But you still get the chance to make extremely diverse characters. Fat and sloppy? It’s there. Sexy and insane? That’s available too.

Sadly, and in a rather bizarre decision, Create-A-Style has been axed. No longer can you customize the appearance, color or fabric of your Sim’s clothes (or furniture, once you’re playing), beyond a few pre-determined colors. Maxis says this was done to reduce performance issues, and it’s certainly true that installing a whole load of additional preset textures would increase the CPU load significantly in the older games, but it’s a regrettable and rather backwards step that stands at odds with the effort made elsewhere to improve the customization of your little computer people. An individual’s personality is conveyed as much by their fashion sense and hairstyle as it is by their body language, after all, so for a game claiming to focus more than ever on personality, the absence of customizable clothing sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.

By and large though, the new Create-A-Sim system is a success. It’s just a shame that the actual game is sorely lacking…

Let’s start first with some of the other things that have been removed. Like traits, career options have been severely curtailed in The Sims 4. If you’re looking to be a Police Officer or a Doctor, don’t bother. Those careers are gone, replaced with things like Astronaut, Pro Gamer and Secret Agent. The emphasis seems to have been placed on the wackier, wish-fulfillment side of the scale, to the point where it feels as though Maxis chose its career paths by speaking to a focus group of six year olds and asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up (and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they actually did do that). Pools and the ability to raise or lower the terrain has been removed, though you can still create fountains. The neighborhood around you doesn’t change without your intervention. This means while you’re playing as your family, the neighborhood around you will age, but they won’t have children or get married or even move home. Play too long on one family and unless you disengage character aging in the options, you’ll come back to a town of old people with no children. It’s a bit like Children of Men, except with the apocalyptic miserablism replaced by the epitome of consumer culture.

On the subject of children, Toddlers are gone. Completely gone. You can have babies, if that’s what you want to call them – I’ll explain that in more detail later – and they can grow into kids, but there is no more teaching children to walk and talk or potty training. On top of all of this, there’s no ability to create or place new lots in your two neighborhoods (yep, even the number of neighborhoods has been slashed). You get what you get, and there’s no way to make more.

There are numerous other things that are missing from The Sims 4 despite being present in nearly every iteration of the series, such as the lack of dishwashers, repairmen, cars, and no aliens. Some of the biggest, most crippling differences, though, are the most important and entirely change the core experience that we’ve come to enjoy over the last 14 years. In The Sims 3, players had over 125 lots spread over all the available worlds. The Sims 4 only offers you 25. And of the lots that are available, their size has been cut down to just a fraction of the size of what they used to be. Say goodbye to 64×64 lots, and hello to only a couple 50×50 and 40×30 lots. Other lots are smaller than that. I attempted making my own house on an empty 40×30 lot, and grew quickly aggravated by the lack of room available. And with only having the ability to make three floors in a house, there’s no option of building up instead of out to compensate. Want to make a sprawling mansion to reflect your absurd bank balance? You’re out of luck. While the new building creation tools are impressive, and more intuitive than ever before thanks to how houses remold yourselves and the ability to pick up and drop rooms with the architecture adjusting to accommodate your choice, you quickly reach the limits of what the game enables you to do, stalling your creative desires. Within ten minutes of looking around, I quickly decided to just take a pre-built house. For a series born in part thanks to Will Wright’s fascination with architecture, it feels like The Sims 4 is almost a betrayal of one of the core concepts that has defined it over the years.

There are no cars, no garages, no burglars, no babysitters… the list of removed gameplay features is almost endless.

It’s not all bad though, and while players who have always enjoyed The Sims as a creative outlet are likely to be severely disappointed, those who prefer the social interactions between Sims are well catered for. A few minutes into gameplay and I saw one of the most impressive additions to The Sims 4 – multitasking and freedom of behavior. A simple outing to your Sims’ local bar can quickly escalate into a fist-fight, arguments and even inappropriate romantic exchanges. While your character is sitting at the computer working on their book, they can hold a full conversation with someone else in the room. You can work out while chatting with your spouse. Before, characters had to stop what they were doing in order to do something else; now, so long another activity is compatible with what they’re currently doing, they can do several things at once. You can even talk to multiple people at once, making social gatherings rife with new possibilities.

But even with these aspects, my attention quickly dwindled as I kept playing. For everything Maxis has added or improved on, they’ve taken another 2 or 3 features away or cut them back to the point of irrelevance. The Sims has always been about freedom. By it’s very nature, it’s a sandbox experience; with The Sims 4, it feels as though the developers decided instead to push players down a very specific style of play - the interactions between the Sims themselves - rather than allow players to continue enjoying the little niche that they’ve always enjoyed. You can visit a club, but you can’t walk across the street. You can throw amazing parties, but you can’t walk next door to say hi to your neighbors without a loading screen. You can have a job, but every time you go to work, you disappear from the world until you return home after your shift.

It’s like being a comedian without a stage. You can only laugh at yourself in the mirror for so long before your cheeks hurt. There’s a surface layer of potential on top of The Sims 4, but once you get past the initial gloss and high production values, there’s nothing but a mouthful of sour tastes as you see the unpolished gameplay and the gaps in content. Neighborhoods that once lived and thrived have become some kind of 2D map that you might see on the screen of your cell phone. The Sims 4 is missing a lot of what fans of the franchise come back for. Locations are flat, boring and pointless. There’s nothing to do but sit and talk and grow old. Even killing your Sims - the guilty pleasure of many a player - has become boring. I spent an hour trying to kill my character just for some kind of fun and quickly became frustrated with how difficult it was.

Now, I want to talk about something that really tweaked me the wrong way with The Sims 4. The removal of toddlers was a pretty hard blow. Who didn’t love buying potty seats and high chairs and teaching their toddlers to walk and talk for a chance of extra aspiration and life points? But I was willing to give this baby-to-child thing a chance. So after getting settled and quickly becoming bored, I decided to start woohooing like crazy to get myself that baby. Now I will say this – I laughed out loud when the daughter of my family walked in on her parents in bed together doing the deed. She stopped dead in her tracks, screamed in terror, and ran from the room. I don’t know why that brought me such joy, but the fact that the interaction was so realistic made me happy. After a few rounds and scaring my daughter, my female Sim was pregnant. A few days later, my family had a new baby girl. Then I realized something. There were no cribs. Not a single one. All I found in the Buy Mode was a single bassinet, which had a couple of colors to choose from. So I bought my bassinet and I put in the bedroom, awaiting my Sim to come home from the imaginary hospital.

She came home, alright. She walked through the front door sporting a flat tummy and with no sign of a baby. She walked upstairs, into the new baby’s bedroom, up to the bassinet – and that was it. All the sudden there was a baby in the bassinet. And the baby became nothing more than an object. You can pick up the baby, change the baby, feed the baby, but all of it is done from the bassinet. And let me tell you something – Whatever the hell baby my Sim had, take it back! Nightmare fuel. I had one baby in The Sims 4 during my time of playing. I will never have another. Having a child in The Sims 4 is no different from interacting with a microwave.

At least a microwave lets you conjure up tasty treats.

There are some technical hiccups too. At times, the game crashed to desktop without warning. Characters have a hard time performing simple tasks without walking into each other, walls, or furniture. Some bugs are to be expected, but The Sims 4 feels unfinished and unpolished, rushed out to meet a release date. It’s possible that many of these issues may be fixed post-launch, but then last year’s disastrous Simcity is still plagued with problems almost a year since release.

The Sims 4 feels like a backwards step. It’s prettier, it has new features like emotions and living capabilities, but in the end the hints of greatness that are there pale in comparison to what’s not there. My honest opinion? Go back to The Sims 3 and wait for the inevitable avalanche of expansions that is bound to come for this latest version. Maybe, just maybe, Maxis will listen to fans; but for the time being, save your money.