Credit: Maxis
reviewGame Reviewsthe-sims-4
The Sims 4 Is Still a Great Dollhouse With Too Many Locked Doors
August 24, 2026·7 min read
More than a decade of updates has turned Maxis' life simulator into a huge creative sandbox, but the free base game still has a habit of showing you something interesting before pointing toward a paid pack.
The Sims 4 is easier to recommend in 2026 than its age suggests. The base game is free, Create a Sim remains one of the best character creators around, and Build Mode can swallow an entire evening before your household has even moved in. Years of updates have also filled in many of the gaps that made the original 2014 release feel surprisingly bare.
The basic appeal has barely changed. Create a few people, give them somewhere to live, find them jobs, start some relationships, and then watch your plans fall apart because somebody is hungry, embarrassed, late for work, or more interested in washing a plate than using the toilet you told them to use five minutes ago.
The problem is that The Sims 4 is no longer just one game. There are now 21 expansion packs, alongside Game Packs, Stuff Packs, Kits, Marketplace content, and the Moola currency. We have already ranked the best Sims 4 DLCs, and a lot of what people now associate with the game, from pets and university to weather and high school, sits outside the free version.
You can have a great time without spending anything. The longer you play, though, the easier it becomes to see all the locked doors.
Some of the best parts of The Sims 4 happen before you even press play. Create a Sim gives you plenty of control without turning character creation into a wall of sliders. Faces and bodies can be reshaped directly, while clothes, voices, walk styles, traits, and aspirations make it easy to create Sims who already feel different before they have said a word to each other.
Build Mode is even better. Rooms can be resized in seconds, whole sections of a house can be moved, objects are easy to search for, and premade rooms are there when your dream kitchen starts looking more like a badly furnished box. It is flexible enough for serious builders without becoming miserable for everyone else. For plenty of players, building the house is not something you do before the real game starts. It is the real game.
The Gallery strengthens that side of The Sims 4 even further. Players can share Sims, households, rooms, and entire lots, so someone with no interest in learning how to build a mansion can simply download one made by somebody who spent six hours perfecting the staircase. It remains one of the game's best community features, especially because the Gallery is separate from the paid Marketplace.
Live Mode has plenty going on. Sims have needs, careers, relationships, skills, aspirations, emotions, money problems, and increasingly complicated families. Multitasking helps them feel busy in a believable way, while emotions can change which interactions are available and how easily a day goes off course.
The problem is that most ordinary households eventually become quite easy to control. Careers have clear requirements, needs fall into routines, and relationships can usually be pushed in the direction you want with enough repeated interactions. Once you know how the systems work, keeping a family fed, employed, reasonably happy, and socially functional stops being much of a challenge.
The illusion also falls apart whenever Sims make obviously stupid decisions on their own. They ignore urgent tasks, wander off halfway through something important, or decide that another glass of water is more important than the job you have already asked them to do twice.
EA is still working on this. A major quality-of-life update focused on autonomy is scheduled for September 2026 after months of work on Sim behavior, routing, sleep, infants, toddlers, and other long-running issues. Twelve years after launch, Maxis is still fixing some very basic ways Sims behave.
The free base game gives you a lot. You can build homes, create families, pursue careers, raise children, form relationships, explore the included neighborhoods, develop skills, and download community creations without buying anything. That is more than enough to find out whether The Sims 4 is your kind of game. The problem comes when you start looking at everything else.
Pets are in a pack. University is in a pack. Seasons, apartments, fame, horses, high school, businesses, supernatural Sims, additional worlds, deeper family systems, and major romance features all sit somewhere in the DLC catalogue. EA now lists 21 full expansion packs before you even start counting the smaller releases.
If you have been buying them gradually for years, those packs can work together surprisingly well. A family can live in one expansion's world, own pets from another, send their teenager to high school through another, and eventually pack them off to university.
Starting fresh in 2026 feels very different. You can see how broad The Sims 4 has become, but huge parts of that experience come with another price attached. Games such as Paralives are also emerging as alternatives for players who like the building and life-simulation side of the genre without more than a decade of DLC behind them.
The Marketplace makes spending even harder to ignore. Maker Packs and Kits can be bought through the in-game store using Moola, while larger packs continue to use normal real-world purchases. Moola cannot be earned through play, and Maker Packs require it. The free game still works perfectly well without any of this, but you see the shop much more often now because it sits directly alongside Live Mode, Build Mode, and Create a Sim.
Maxis has not abandoned the base game while selling DLC. The July 2026 update finally added AutoSave and Save Reminders, alongside Memory Boost improvements aimed at making longer sessions and complicated saves run more reliably.
EA later said Memory Boost had fixed a memory-related crash that could occur while travelling after loading certain saves, although other loading problems were still being investigated. Recent updates have also dealt with problems involving family trees, weddings freezing, custom content, roofs, saves, the Gallery, and Sim behavior.
That does not mean everybody's game is constantly broken. Plenty of players can go for long stretches without serious problems. It does mean that twelve years of updates and dozens of packs have left Maxis with plenty to keep repairing.
AutoSave is one of the best examples. I am glad The Sims 4 finally has it. It is also strange that it took until 2026.
The Sims 4 is still ridiculously easy to lose time in. You sit down planning to give one Sim a new bedroom and suddenly you have rebuilt the house, changed everyone's clothes, downloaded three neighboring families from the Gallery, and spent twenty minutes deciding whether the kitchen table looks better one square to the left.
That is where the game is still at its best. The free version gives you enough room to build, experiment, create families, and watch things go wrong without asking for money upfront. There is no reason not to start there.
The expensive part begins when you decide you want pets, better family systems, another world, university, weather, supernatural Sims, or whatever catches your attention next. Buying a few packs that match how you actually play makes far more sense than trying to assemble some imaginary complete version of The Sims 4.
Builders, character creators, and players who enjoy making their own stories can still get an enormous amount out of it. As a life simulator, though, The Sims 4 works better when you are the one creating the chaos. Leave the Sims alone for too long and they are often more likely to make a sandwich, put it down somewhere stupid, and complain that they cannot reach the chair beside them.
The dollhouse is still brilliant. The people living inside it could use a little more help. For more Game reviews, features, guides, and gaming coverage, visit Zero1Gaming.
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7h ago
Unleash your imagination and create a unique world of Sims that's an expression of you! Explore and customize every detail from Sims to homes, and much more with The Sims 4. Life, and Sims, are yours to control. Customize your unique Sims, design their homes & take them on wild a
Released
September 2, 2014
Developer
The Sims Studio
Publisher
Electronic Arts
