Parents' Guide to The Sims 4: City Living

This expansion brings back a lot of great features that players might have felt were long missing from the fourth installment of the franchise. Apartment living is back from The Sims 3 with a lot of great updates. Multiple families can now stay on the same apartment floor, a totally new feature that opens up more social interactions. Your Sim can work their way up from a dilapidated starter apartment complete with rats, roaches, and frequently breaking appliances to the penthouse suite. Apartment traits are probably the most exciting new feature of this expansion, and connecting your Sim with a house that has the proper traits is equally as important as actual character traits. These traits can have positive aspects, such as the penny pincher, which allows Sims to find hidden money, or negative aspects such as hauntings or the potential for earthquakes. This expansion is a must-have for fans of The Sims series. There's a huge theme centered on getting out and adventuring, and activities such as open-air flea markets, creative festivals, and special events ensure your Sim will never get bored. The themes are great, too, with many based on events you might come across in the real world. GeekCon, for example, is a celebration of all things geek from cosplay to video game competitions.

The three new jobs in this expansion are very different, because your characters don't have to go to work in an office. Instead, you assign tasks that get your Sims to go out and do things such as drumming up donations on the political path or manage unruly forums as a social media expert. The only downside is that City Living is pretty much the gaming equivalent of empty calories. Sure, there's a lot of extra content to do stuff with, but there aren't really any new ways to do them. Visiting new venues is great, but it's not long before you realize that you could be doing pretty much the same stuff at any of the previous venues. That won't stop Sims fans from wanting to swap out last year's art deco furniture with this year's latest fad, though. After all, this is The Sims, where your world is still whatever you make of it.