The Sims 4 Get to Work: Half-Baked

While all of the new professions are similar to jobs sims have been able to pursue previously, Get to Work has its own way of handling things that makes most of these roles feel more substantial than they have in the past.

When you’re on-the-clock in either the Doctor, Scientist or Detective professions, you’ll have a list of tasks to complete to increase your work performance. This is similar to the list of activities players are given when their sim hosts a party or goes out on a date. You’re free to ignore the list, but playing along is well rewarded—and that’s the point. The purpose of these tasks is to get you to play along in a way that many wouldn’t otherwise, and they might be one of my favorite features in The Sims 4. In the context of active-careers, these tasks will vaguely guide you through a routine. Scientists will be working on a variety of fun and chaos-causing experiments, Doctors will be going through the process of diagnosing and treating patients, and Detectives will hop from location to location solving cases and patrolling the streets. Professional tasks also encourage you to have your sim engage in less formal workplace habits like gossiping with coworkers or sneaking a snack break… Or using your ray gun to turn all the toilets in the building into bar stools.

There can be a lot of repetition in these tasks and they don’t change very dramatically as your sim climbs in rank, but you’re given a few to deal with at a time so there’s always some wiggle room to pursue whatever interests you most. There are also rare tasks that pop up and require special attention from your sims. These occur just often enough to keep things fresh, but not so often that they lose their uniqueness. Worst case scenario: if your sim’s current job tasks are a bore you always have the option to take a break and send them to work without your omniscient presence guiding them.

Tasks only ever became a problem to me while I was trying out the role Doctor, where your sim’s work relies on having a steady stream of patients and in some cases access to a superior. There is a point early in that track where you can treat patients with simple shots or doses of medicine, but you can’t diagnose them unless you get very lucky with their test results. Instead, you need to transfer them to a superior so they can be diagnosed—except the only person who could diagnose patients, the only doctor, had left the hospital an hour after my sim’s shift began. I was stuck in a task list limbo, where I couldn’t complete anything on my list because sick sims just weren’t getting diagnosed, and at the end of the day my performance evaluation was brutally unfair. I had still been “playing along,” doing unlisted things that I knew were supposed to be part of my duties, but I didn’t get enough credit from them to offset the stalled list.

That said, one of the most interesting things about professions is how easy it is for you to mess up. Not your sim, not the game, but you the player. Sims can mess up the same way they always can, of course, by fumbling with a beaker or lighting something on fire, but you have some dangerous power in Get to Work, and when you cut corners or fail to pay attention there can absolutely be consequences. If you rush to make an arrest without sufficient evidence, you may end up arresting and interrogating an innocent bystander. If you rush to make a diagnosis without thorough tests, you may end up performing surgery on someone who isn’t even sick. The Sims rarely places that kind of burden on its players, and in some sense its overdue. The risk of a personal failure gives you a reason to be invested.

Of the three professions, Detective may shine the brightest, especially compared to its precursor in Ambitions. Detectives now work with an entire unit, and their interactions lean hard into goofy procedural parody. Once a shift your sim will go talk to the police chief, who’ll gruffly share some variation of “You’re a loose cannon!” or “I don’t know how they do things where you’re from, but here…” The animations when you’re interrogating a suspect are artful and lively, too. Every facial expression, every gesture, either so perfectly measured or utterly bombastic and out of control. When you give someone a citation, Simlish gives way to the universal language of onomatopoeia: “Wee-oo wee-oo! Uh-uh.”

But Detective is another place where you can see the expansion pack’s seams. Once you close a case, you can also use any leftover evidence you happen to have in your pockets to solve the next one. I solved a case without ever visiting the crime scene. Because these systems are so highly generalized, it’s often just a matter of going through the motions.

And then there are the rewards. The ultimate reward for climbing to the top of a profession is a room that you can plop onto your lot to do many of your favorite work tasks at home. This makes the most sense for a Scientist because their work is quite fun and varied. For a Doctor…. Well, I don’t see the appeal, but it’s not wholly unappealing either. And then there’s the Detective who, as Get to Work’s launch trailer proudly announces, can have a jail in their basement. Even Batman doesn’t have a jail in his basement and his basement is a big secret cave that would probably make a very good jail.

Talking Shop

Beyond the active careers, households can purchase retail lots. Get to Works’s retail systems have surprising depth, but as I mentioned earlier they have their limits. When you buy a retail store you’re given a great deal of control over what happens within its walls. You can hire employees who each have different strengths and weaknesses, assign them uniforms, scold them when they slack off or promote them when they’re doing well. You can tweak the appearance and poses of mannequins in addition to changing what they wear, and when customers drop by to cheerfully try on outfits you can swoop in with a convincing pitch to win the sale. Sales contribute to a special bank of points that you can use to buy perks for your shop and your staff, reduced restocking fees and speedier checkout times among them.

This retail system is much more robust than I expected it to be, and it works perfectly with traditional stores and even retail art galleries. But I didn’t want to run a traditional store or a retail art gallery. I wanted a bakery, just like the ones in the trailers. Unfortunately the systems as they stand are just so ill-suited to the idea of a bakery or a cafe that it’s not something the marketing materials should be leading with. It feels more like the bakery features were modded in by a clever fan, and if that were the case it would be so much easier to overlook the brokenness of this setup. A modder wouldn’t have the time or resources to ensure that customers would behave differently in a bakery. These mechanics work well in other shops because everything is spread out and the behavior of drifting around browsing for hours or coercing someone into a purchase is perfectly normal. But it doesn’t translate. You don’t stand around for hours on the wrong side of the counter at Starbucks, hemming and hawing about whether you want to buy a plate of cupcakes or a plate of eclairs. You’re basically the worst person in the world (or at least on the block) if you spend more than a few minutes trying to make up your mind at the counter.

I do enjoy Get to Work, but at the same time I still can’t help but feel a little misled. It wasn’t even necessary to be misleading, because Get to Work has a lot of strong points. Even with its flaws, it builds on The Sims 2 Open for Business and The Sims 3 Ambitions enough to stand on its own. More importantly, it’s fun.

It provides moments of uncanny realism. Every story you can tell about your sim’s retail store is almost indistinguishable from the real-life retail experiences so many of us have had. After a long day pushing cupcakes, my exhausted baker retreated to the bathroom only to find that someone had broken the toilet hours earlier, leaving water to spill out over the floor unchecked. At the same time, it’s still The Sims. One incident comes to mind, when my sim showed up to work at the hospital one morning and the receptionist and the doctor had switched roles—and also one of them was now a ghost.

Believe it or not my biggest problem with The Sims 4 Get to Work isn’t that my bakery was a bust. It’s that pretty much everything it adds to the game is one-sided. As far as I can tell I can’t send my sims to the hospital or the police station or the lab to look around. It’s interesting enough to work in these locations, but how much more interesting could it be with outward-facing interactions? A loading screen will eventually ask, “Have you visited Magnolia Promenade? A world of shopping awaits.” But why would I visit? Almost everything that’s for sale in the stores initially placed on the four lot zone can be acquired for free in Create-a-Sim, gathered from the environment, or purchased at a much lower price in Build Mode. The only shop I’d love to send my sim to is a bakery, but we know how that goes.

The Sims 4 Get to Work was developed by Maxis and The Sims Studio and published by EA. We played it on the PC. It is also available for Mac.

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Janine Hawkins is a games writer based in sunny Canada. You can find her written and video work on HealerArcherMage.com or follow her on Twitter @bleatingheart.