Deep career-focused expansion adding interactive jobs, inventive science antics, and customizable retail businesses
Deep career-focused expansion adding interactive jobs, inventive science antics, and customizable retail businesses
Pros
- New jobs with creative skills
- Ability to open up your own business
- Tons of fun inventions to play with
Cons
- Plenty of busy work advancing in a career path
- Detective job is a bit underwhelming
Get to Work is an expansion for The Sims 4 that expands deeply on the occupations of your Sims and provides you with a whole raft of new features and materials for customizing their lives - or terrorizing their lives, as the case may be. The Sims series, and Sims 4 in particular, have earned Electronics Arts a lot of money and created a loyal and enthusiastic fanbase. But while new expansions are released regularly, the addition of a rich and meaningful work-life could hypothetically change the Sims dynamic in a big way.
The biggest pull here is the fact that you can now interact with your Sims at work, and there are three new jobs that mix up the formula of vanilla Sims in some really fun ways. Each of the jobs comes with their own career track, and following them through to their conclusion is the best way to make the most of this expansion. Detectives go through the methodical process of investigating crime scenes and comparing clues, while doctors get to deliver the babies of other Sims in the neighborhood and use their own detective skills to suss out diseases.
But the biggest expansion of content comes with the scientist profession. Maxis' irreverence is on full display with a job that draws on pulp fiction mad scientists. Wanting to freeze your fellow Sims or make the whole neighborhood take a nap? You have the option with Get to Work. Scientists can even discover alien life and venture to bizarre new worlds to investigate them. The other jobs may make incremental changes to the formula, but scientists pack in a whole lot of new content.
Just keep in mind that the new focus on work also changes what it's like to control your Sims at home. In other words, it can often seem like your new Sims simply work to live. The amount of rest they need when they get home greatly narrows the amount of time you can devote to social activities with your Sims. It's a more expansive approach to the lives of your Sims that can also paradoxically feel much more narrow. Fortunately, you can always revert back to the original if you find yourself wanting to return to the classic. You also might find yourself more interesting the deeper you get into the career track. Just like anything in the Sims, success is all about maxing out skills and balancing your time. Your Sims will start on the lowest end of the totem pole but eventually find themselves in control of some of the coolest features available in the game.
But new jobs aren't the only addition in Get to Work. The other big elephant in the room is retail businesses. This new system adds value to the jobs and skills that are already present in the Sims 4 by letting you open up your own shop. Success largely means chatting with customers until they're persuaded to buy something, but it definitely adds value to the new photography and baking skills. This also plays to the strength of Sim's massive catalog of items. Pretty much anything in the game can be sold in your store, and that lends a huge amount of value to every job that exists.
Get to Work is the rare expansion that actually fundamentally changes the experience of a core game. The new jobs let you explore new worlds and peddle just about anything. The fact that it's the first expansion for Sims 4 means there's room to grow, but it's a hefty package in its own right.
Pros
- New jobs with creative skills
- Ability to open up your own business
- Tons of fun inventions to play with
Cons
- Plenty of busy work advancing in a career path
- Detective job is a bit underwhelming
Pros
- Some careers offer more than others
- It adds a different dimension to the game
- It gives you the type of content you should have had in the first download
- Plenty of customization options for the retail stores
- The more you progress, then the more you get to do.
- There is at least a weeks worth of extra content to play with.
Cons
- The hospitals have no tension at all
- Career progression is very restrictive
- It simply adds more things to add into your repetitive routine
- The alien world is just there to please the kids
- It is not going to knock your socks off
More content and more hours of gameplay to enjoy.
The Sims 4 Get to Work is the first full and official expansion pack for the Sims 4, and its reception has only been lukewarm because it feels like content they should have included in the original. It feels as if the creators held a lot of material back from the base game for Sims 4, and that they have created an expansion pack with the stuff they held onto. If you buy the expansion, then it is going to keep you busy for a while. If you give it eight hours every day, then you will get around one week of extra gameplay out of it before you start repeating yourself and re-treading old ground (i.e. re-applying for the same job and starting from scratch again).
Three New Career Paths
Yes, you read that correctly, there are only three new career paths, but they each have a fair amount of depth, which makes taking them up more rewarding in the short term. In the long term, it just feels like they have added more things to do repeatedly. It feels like they have added more routine, but then isn’t that a big part of the Sims as a whole? They are supposed to mimic real life, and yet most of us end up doing the same things over and over again with no real purpose or meaning (sounds like real life to me).
Climb Up The Ladder To See Aliens
In this expansion, there are aliens, and you see signs of them from time to time. For example, as a scientist, you can contact them, and as a doctor, you see men that have been impregnated by aliens. If you progress high enough up your career ladder, then eventually you are able to visit the alien world. You may also create aliens, who themselves have their own powers and such.
Fill Up Your Hunger Bar
If you decide to become a scientist, you can create serums and such that you can use to affect the mood or the desires of your Sims. For example, you can create a serum that will fill up the hunger bar of your Sim so that you do not have to eat. This is a very similar mechanic to the science station on the Sims 1. There was a chemistry table that was added on one of the expansion packs that allowed you to change your Sims statistics. You could also make the green potion that filled up your Sims needs bars. This expansion works with a similar idea.
Progress With Your Career To Do More Things
As you go up the ladder, you open up new options within the game. For example, as a detective, you are only allowed to collect and process evidence, but then as you are promoted, you are able to file a case report and such. As a starter officer, you have to hand off your evidence to somebody higher up the chain, but as you go up the chain you take on more and more so that you can collect evidence, or have other people do it, and then go through the entire crime solving process that includes interviewing the criminals and such.
Pros
- Some careers offer more than others
- It adds a different dimension to the game
- It gives you the type of content you should have had in the first download
- Plenty of customization options for the retail stores
- The more you progress, then the more you get to do.
- There is at least a weeks worth of extra content to play with.
Cons
- The hospitals have no tension at all
- Career progression is very restrictive
- It simply adds more things to add into your repetitive routine
- The alien world is just there to please the kids
- It is not going to knock your socks off
