No matter the weather — The Sims 4: Seasons review

While Cats and Dogs was my most anticipated Sims 4 expansion, after playing Seasons for many hours, I can safely say that Seasons is by far my favorite expansion currently. The DLC gets so many things done right and adds to the game and gameplay in intelligent and meaningful ways. This may be the first must have expansion for The Sims 4, and that’s saying a lot.

Every expansion adds on things to do or ways to interact with the world, but what Seasons adds is so much more. It adds in meaningful content that changes the day to day lives of your Sims. Each season brings along weather and temperature to the game which you have to watch out for. If it’s winter you have to dress your Sims accordingly so they don’t get cold, or even freeze to death. Summer is the opposite, with your Sims wearing lighter clothes so they don’t get too hot. Spring brings many rainstorms, so having an umbrella available is smart so your Sims don’t get wet. All of this adds an extra layer to the roleplaying that most Sim players participate in already, and having to dress them for the season is fun and helps bring you into the game so much more than any of the packs before it.

There is also a ton of new things to do throughout all the seasons that just give you more ways to play and interact with the world. Winter brings snow in which you can make a snow angel, build a snowman, and scrape your walkways. Spring has puddles to jump in and shower storms to play in (just be careful, since you can be struck by lightning!). Fall has leaves falling everywhere to play in. And summer allows you to cool off by running in the sprinklers and swimming in pools. It may not seem like much, but there is so many other things to do during the seasons and I constantly was finding new ways to interact with the town I was in and it just made my usual “downtime” in the Sims extremely enjoyable. It really takes some of the days you are waiting for work or to go to an event and gives you all these different small things you can do. To be honest, this was the selling point of the expansion for me, as Seasons is packed with new content and ways to interact with the world and my Sims in new and exciting ways.

Another major addition has been the inclusion of an actual calendar and all the holidays. Actually pulling up on my calendar what holidays and events were coming up in the future was a really nice, and really needed feature. Actually knowing when things were going to happen has been a guessing game until now, and it is a feature I did not know I fully needed until i used it. It was definitely a small addition but one that changed the game for the better.

The holidays in Seasons are also a game changer. There are plenty of them, from a Christmas-like event, New Years, and even a love holiday. They are spaced out nicely throughout the year and there is always a holiday to look forward to. You can decorate your whole house with an item that are attic boxes, or you could go into buy mode and go through all the new items to fully decorate how you want. On the holiday, you will have a list of things a Sim wants to accomplish and the more you do, the better the holiday is for the Sim. You don’t have to participate at all, but it breaks up the daily grind in the Sims with a whole new day just to do some new things. I have found the holidays are all wonderful and truly add to the game by giving us moment in our playing where things can be switched up a bit, which was both refreshing and needed. I have been playing The Sims 4 since before release and pretty religiously, and I must say this whole expansion has renewed my passion for the series.

There are also a ton of new items to build and dress yourself with. You can even buy a machine to change the weather! I had great fun adding decor and furniture that matched the seasons’ themes and had a blast checking out all the new goodies. Between appearances and the build mode there is more than enough new items to play with. This is possibly the most content heavy expansion in terms of items and gameplay mechanics.

My biggest complaint in the whole expansion is the fact that there is no new town. All the the major expansions before have given us a new town to play in that heavily featured the expansions stuff. While I was bummed about this, at the same time I can forgive them. What they did instead was made seasons fully integrated into all the other towns, and they did extremely well. No matter what town you are in snow will cover the whole map, and beautifully. Rain will cause ripples in pools and bodies of water. Leaves will be all over the town. Sometimes the towns I have played so many times before feel new and have so much to go out and do. While I would have liked to have seen a new town altogether, what they did with the existing towns was incredible.

They also added a new gardening career. While I have gardened as little as possible in the past because it has never interested me, I fully embodied gardening to try out the new career. I have to say the career itself is pretty straightforward and doesn’t really feel like anything special. While it was fun to have a new career path to follow I personally will probably not take that path again in other playthroughs. It was a nice feature but really was just another career path you cannot actually play through and fell a little flat.

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