The Sims 4: Get Together Review

The Sims 4 has been out for just over a year and already we’ve had two game packs, six Stuff Packs and now two expansions. No surprise there, since the base game upon release was fairly... sparse, but who’d have thought it would happen so quickly, even for EA. I’ll be upfront, I wasn’t a huge fan of the base game and as such didn’t purchase the Get to Work expansion, so this latest one, Get Together will be my first on that front.

The main premise for Get Together is to create and join clubs, and is the feature that introduces the most change into the puppeteered life of the sim. Your sims will be encouraged to get out and explore with folk they share connections with. It’s clever really, one of my main complaints about the original was the lack of open world (instead we have all the loading screens), which was utilised so well in The Sims 3, so the push to visit different lots and places means you’re actually motivated to experience more than just your own delightfully-crafted lot.

I’ll admit the clubs feature is extremely extensive, and I am genuinely impressed at the thought that has gone into crafting it. In each club you create limits on who can and cannot join, and those limits can be as exclusive or free as you like. You can even restrict age groups, so if you’d like a bunch of senior sims with the ‘gloomy’ and ‘hates children’ traits, then so be it (not that that’s what I’ll be like in my pensioner years), or you can have only those in the comedian career path by limiting access by job choice.

Once you’ve chosen the clientele who will be frequenting your club you can then decide where they will hang out. You’ll be able to build your own hangout, which will become limited to the members of the club you build it for. So a nightclub with plenty of drinks, and no annoying kids is of course the perfect place for my fabulous seniors, but you can choose anything from a museum, to a spa, to a gym (not that anyone would hang out in a gym, am I right?).

You think that deciding upon who you’ll allow into your club, and where you’ll hang out would be enough but there’s a lot, LOT more to get to grips with. You’ll need to enforce some rules darling, you are representing the golden oldies after all. I’m not even going to attempt to list what rules you can put into place, suffice it to say that there are many. You have the ability to set out what your group will be doing when they spend time together, and you can also put down some activities that you definitely won’t be partaking in. Maybe you’ll want to enforce a no flirting rule, because Gladys can never quite seem to keep it in her pants, saucy minx. Basically you can be as creative as you like and it really does give the expansion and the base game a lot more replay value, because there is so much to experiment with; it’s the first time since release that I’ve had much interest in loading up and getting my sim on.

When your sims are doing something approved by the club they will earn Club Points which are another exciting fictional currency with which to buy shit. In this case the shit you will be buying with these points are Club Perks. There is once again, a very large list of things available to collect and these range from social increases when meeting new sims, to a secret handshake, to affecting the mood (we’ll stay away from ‘extra flirty’ for Gladys’ sake) and you can even increase your member intake. This can be particularly helpful when you have a *ahem* high member turnover like the poor Golden Oldies, who might kick the bucket soon but at least they party hard getting there.
Clubs aren’t everything there is to Get Together, as avid builders will be excited to find not just another neighbourhood to bulldoze and renovate, but over 200 new items to decorate with, which is a really decent amount for an expansion pack. There will no doubt be thousands of hours spent all over the world crafting the perfect bar, library or just humble abode.

There’s only two new skills added this expansion, which seems quite low, but the amount of new socialising content somewhat makes up for/masks this fact. The skills themselves are fairly trivial too, Dancing and DJ Mixing. While the latter can be tracked, the former is a minor skill, something that you just see the results of practice with, rather than actively seeing what level they are at. There is no huge benefit to honing this skill other than maybe to show up Gladys on the dance floor with your sweet, sweet moves. DJ Mixing on the other hand is slightly more useful, acting like a guitar or piano, you learn how to spin and mix and those with powerful pop-track prowess might even make the odd simoleon on the side with it. Other than these there is no new career-related content but with a previous expansion of Get to Work, I guess that could be forgiven.

It is nice to see The Sims 4 being built on and improved steadily, it does feel like the game is a bit less hollow now. Having been used to an almost standard list of expansions gracing the repertoire of previous incarnations, it’s clear that EA is trying to break out of that mould and offer gameplay that fans might not be used to. I could say ‘if it ain't broke, don’t fix it’, but in this case, I think the originality has paid off. Ultimately, Get Together is a strong expansion for a pretty non-impactful base game and lifts it as a whole to the standard I would have expected in the first place.