The Sims 4: Cottage Living

I’ve been playing Cottage Living for an hour or two each day for a week now, and still feel like I have a lot left to discover. There are plenty of quests, and I really like the laid back simple living feeling to the expansion. Caring for and dressing up my farm animals is an absolute delight. Cottage Living is a total home run in my opinion, if you’re a fan of the game this is a must-have for your collection.

The Sims 4 Cottage Living is a much-needed return to form for The Sims franchise.

Overall, for a DLC pack that has been requested for a long time, The Sims 4: Cottage Living met a lot of expectations. The animals are fun to care for and not too troublesome. Befriending wild animals such as birds and rabbits prove rewarding and worth the effort. Henford-on-Bagley beautifully captures the rural British lifestyle, completing the immersive living-in-the-countryside feel. The errands system is also good fun and rewarding, but is sadly only limited to Henford-on-Bagley and to certain residents. The competitions felt a little lackluster, as well as the collection of new objects for furnishing homes. Apart from this, Cottage Living is a great new addition to The Sims 4. If you want an authentic farming experience, you won't be let down.

Idyllic farm- and country life with a fun treats feature. Authentic animal husbandry and sophisticated gameplay are, however, left out.

Cottage Living has room to improve, but it delivers on the simple joy of taking care of cute animals in a farm-like setting and shows that The Sims 4 still has much to offer.

The Sims 4: Cottage Living adds a variety of new and exciting opportunities to the base game. The new style is themed very well and fits the country aesthetic. The overall number of added features can be overwhelming at times, but this pack comes highly recommended to anyone wishing for a bit more action in the lives of their Sims.

Cottage Living will make a lot of fans happy, and there are plenty of positives in the expansion's attempt to make good on the farming and countryside themes. It's a shame then that a number of aspects hold the pack back from realising its full potential. Henford-on-Bagley is a nice enough world, but errs too much on the safe side to leave a lasting impression.

The good The fairs are quite interesting (excluding the glitches) Looking after pets is quite fun at first and it does add some interesting deaths that appear quite amusing, So ideal for retired sims The bad very lacklustre , bored after a few hours of gameplay, despite the world being aesthetically pleasing it just adds little to the gameplay. This pack is almost too family friendly and the foxes are simply annoying. This pack is only good if you prioritise family gameplay. simply mediocre

When you have dedicated your franchise to being family friendly, you will sooner or later run out of things that are interesting enough to be put in a life simulation. This is normally the part where the Sims hammer out your megastars and superstars expansions, but as with so many things the Sims 4 is way, way beyond that point. I would like to point at the description, which raves about two (out of four) things that are not in the game - well, there are forests, but they are part of the ever illusive open world this game doesn't have, and abundant new ways to connect to the countryside, that this game also doesn't have - not the ways, and not the countryside. The "woodland creatures" live in their own rabbit holes, numbering three: Rabbits (now that's fitting), birds (that don't go anywhere except if you enslave them to garden for you, how realistic is that) and foxes, that look suspiciously like someone just sabotaged the sliders in the pet creator and it shows in their profile pictures where it turns them into horribly deformed nightmare creatures, one of the the several new features that didn't make it into the description because they are of course bugs. Like every new feature their main purpuse seems to be overdoing the three things that they can actually do until you are pissed enough to turn them off, which leaves us with cozy architecture and cozy furniture that even your grandma would sneer at for not wanting to move into a retirement home made out of prejudices angainst old british people, but now you can. And you probably will, because you paid for this, and discover the two new plots of fertile soil that you can put "giant" crops in, after you grinded your gardening skill to the usual heights. You can eat that stuff, even though you know how much chicken **** went into it, or put it out in a sunny warm August day to have it prized in a competition that is mysteriously populated with standard crops of the beginner variety or the same kind of pie, and yet lose. I mean of course, get a participation trophy. And the odd jobs from the unspeakable island expansion make a comeback as "favors" that you get paid for, because Crumple-on-Forever has the worst post office in the world, and therefore a lot of packages that went missing or never got anywhere. And who hasn't dreamed since the day of the Sims 1 to finally do Mrs. Crumplebottom? Yeah, not me, but then again, I also never wanted the f*ing farm expansion that everyone wanted since those days, because I knew it would be boring, and now everyone knows. Can't fault the developers for once, I'd say they actually showed half an effort this time. But there is a reason why nobody wants to be a farmer anymore once he discovers the aforementioned more interesting things in life once puberty hits. So, EA, now that we have done all of that and you are certainly not going down that road with the medieval crap again, can we have that GTA expansion that *I* always wanted? No? Well, thank god for the modding community then.