Get to Work Over the Long Weekend With The Sims 4's First Expansion Pack

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The Sims 4's first expansion, Get to Work, launched earlier this week, and I'm sure that with the long weekend ahead loads of you are wondering if it's worth picking up. My review of this career-oriented add-on went live earlier today over on Paste, if you'd like to hear my two cents. Here's a taste:

The scene is Magnolia Promenade, a bustling shopping district featuring a brand new, pastel-toned bakery. It’s impossible to miss: Mint green walls sitting on prime real estate directly beside a playground. Though it’s regularly packed with customers, this bakery and its modest staff used to end every shift in the red. The first day it made a profit was the day I ditched my dream of a sim bakery and started stocking a shelf in the corner of the shop with $400 chicken statues. The chicken statues sold like hotcakes, while the hotcakes… Not so much. Either way, at least my sim didn’t have to pay her staff out of pocket anymore.

You can read my review in full here, but those of you who have already bought the expansion may have a different question on your mind this weekend: Where exactly should you start? Get to Work adds three active careers and a robust retail mechanic that will support everything from boutiques to galleries, so what should you try out first? Well...

It depends a lot on how you like to play. The three active careers/professions (Doctor, Scientist, and Detective) all rely on task lists to determine job performance, much like the lists that The Sims 4 provides when you host a wedding or go on a date. these tasks encourage you to play along with what your sim should be doing in such a situation, and it's no different in the active careers. What is different is what your sim will be doing in each, and how that plays. Doctor is easily the driest of the three, especially in the early stages. You'll spend most of your time running tests to diagnose patients and treating them, as you would expect. It's fine, but in my opinion it lacks some of the dynamism of Scientist and Detective.

Scientists, much as they were in previous versions, are all about their toys. Ray guns and robots and serums and all kinds of things that have all kinds of effects on the world around you. To put it into perspective, you'll be inventing an object that can make every sim visible in the active neighborhood start dancing in unison within the first few levels of this profession, so it's one of the more entertaining choices available.

Detective blends the heavy routine of Doctor with a couple dashes of the Scientist's zaniness. It also involves visiting a variety of randomly selected lots, deducing who suspects are based on lists of clues, and regularly leans into parody of crime procedurals, so it also doesn't fall short on entertainment value.

If you don't like the idea of completing tasks on a list, buying and operating a retail store may be a better fit for you, as it's much more self-guided. Then again, if you can't choose you can always do retail in addition to one of the new professions, since owning a shop doesn't register as a job in itself. Your sim could end up a Doctor by day and a photo gallery owner by night, if you want.

Have any thoughts on The Sims 4 Get to Work? As always, feel free to share them in the comments below.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

I don't know what I am going to do. As much as I enjoy the sims 4, I can only play for a couple of hours at a time (contrast this to hours and hours when I played the first one). While I would love to blame this on the laundry list mechanic (it took time to get use to in the sims 2 and never enjoy throwing parties) I think I am just getting old. lol But I have been enjoying my creative streak doing simple recolors, something that I always wanted to do for the games. I think I will start with outdoor retreat first and see if I play that pack enough to warrant spending the money on Get to Work. Thanks for the review here and at Paste!

[los sims 4]

I love Sims 4, the last expansion pack about city is awesome!