Sims 4 Vampire Review

[Miina Hunker]

Happy Vampires Day! The new vampire game pack releases tomorrow and I received a free copy of it from EA to review. So I hope I can give you some insights into the pack so you can decide whether you want to buy it.

The third one is Good Vampire, a good vampire wants to satisfy his thirst by drinking plasma packs instead of leeching on humans and wants to be friends with both vampires and humans.

The most prominent need is vampire energy. This works similarly to normal sims energy as it get replenished by sleeping (either in a bed or in a coffin). But your vampires can also use their vampire energy to unleash their supernatural powers such as mind control or super speed (more on powers below).

Vampire energy will decrease when your vampire is exposed to sunlight but apart from sleeping in can be increased again with dark meditation which gives less energy than sleeping but is also faster. So if you just need that little burst of vampire energy to cause hallucinations to your most hated neighbor, this is your go-to interaction.

Vampires and even normal sims get some special interactions with this game pack that are marked with a little bat symbol. For example normal sims can enthuse about vampires or speculate about their existence.

The pipe organ skill can be leveled up at the new pipe organ (duh) up to level 10. With sufficient skill your vampires can perform typical songs with a vampiric vibe or play haunted music. This is pretty fun as it has a unique sound to it and is different from what a sim can do with a piano. In my vampire mansions, this sets a great spooky atmosphere. Nice one!

The vampire lore skill is different from other skills in a way. It can be leveled up to level 15 and while it unlocks specific interactions for your vampires it is also kind of a tutorial for you, the player.

Of course, as a vampire, you will have to satisfy your never ending thirst for blood, or as teen rated sims call it, plasma. A vampire can drink plasma from normal sims, or plasma fruit sources but not from other vampires or aliens.

When drinking from another sim a vampire will have to use his powers to compel the sim in question to let the vampire drink. If you befriend a normal sim you can also ask them for permission to drink some plasma.

Now, what if your vampire is tired of compelling other sims for plasma drinks? What if they want to be good? Plasma packs and plasma fruit is your answer. Vampires who level up the vampire lore skill will learn how to craft various plasma supplies that work without a normal sim to drink from.

The player gets a lot of freedom to customize their vampires in terms of looks and personality. You can play the good, the evil, the neutral vampire or anything in between which I really like! The Sims 4 Vampires gives good groundwork for any vampire story you want to tell while still offering compelling gameplay and a spooky atmosphere. The new world is small but still a big plus since it adds to the overall atmosphere of the game.

There are plenty of possibilities for your vampires. On top of the regular aspirations, there are new vampire ones like becoming a master (Dracula), staying as human as possible (Louis), or creating a coven of vampires to keep you company in your eternal solitude (Paris Hilton).

I love the aesthetics of this expansion. Maybe because I was a bit of a goth when I was in high school, but the wide variety of vampire looks is awesome. The furniture is mostly of the Victorian Gothic variety, but the clothes range from pure Victorian to a Gothic-punk look that you might remember from Vampire: the Masquerade.

The bright shining stars are the Sims customization options themselves. You have a whole series of scary veins, scars and spooky glowing eyes to design your new vampire Sims. My favorite feature is the Dark Form. Unlike Twilight vampires where you just look like a douchebag 24/7, dark form vampires are like Buffy vampires that shift form when doing vampire stuff.

You could create a vampire that looks like Special Agent Booth from Bones when in his normal state, but then becomes a vicious crazy-fanged monster with a deformed forehead when feeding on mortals. Alternatively, just make a vampire who permanently embodies the look of death like Nosferatu or Kellyanne Conway.

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I don't tend to be biased towards games just because they're new, so I feel it carries some weight when I say that The Sims 4 Werewolves Game Pack has immediately become one of my favourite add-ons for The Sims 4. Having been a fan of the Vampires and Realm Of Magic (a.k.a. wizards, basically) game packs since their respective releases, I can safely say that Werewolves has done an excellent job iterating and expanding on what worked from those previous supernatural outings.

In fact, the biggest downside I got from playing Werewolves is that the monsters in question feel more fleshed-out than the perhaps less niche occult types in the game. Players are already calling for Vampires, ROM, and even the mermaids added in Island Living to receive a refresh along Werewolves' lines, and honestly, I'm kind of on the fandom's side here.

Like many Sims 4 players, I've had werewolves high up on my new features wishlist for a while. A good 75% of my time in The Sims is spent re-creating characters from other media I enjoy, and since much other media I enjoy has some heavy supernatural themes going on, you can imagine my ongoing distress at the lack of lycanthropes. My Monster Prom Sims have all been looking amazing lately, except for poor sweet Scott Howl, who was stuck as a vanilla human with as much facial hair as I could give him (not much, sadly).

So naturally, as soon as I got my hands on the preview for Werewolves, I set about recreating Scott from the ground up. (A brief required disclaimer here: my screenshots for this article were taken from the preview build, and so might not align completely with the released version.)

I have been known to lose entire days to my efforts in Create-A-Sim, but on this occasion I'll admit to being a tiny bit impatient to jump into Live Mode. That said, I made sure to have a proper poke around at all the new features, and my fellow CAS fans are in for quite a treat. Werewolves, like many other occult life states in The Sims 4, have two parallel forms for you to edit: their normal human appearance and their transformed appearance (known, in werewolves' case, as Beast Form).

Most interestingly, Beast Form editing allows you to fully mould your werewolf's appearance using a suite of unique options, some of which have clearly taken notes from the Cats & Dogs expansion. A stand-out feature, for example, is the option to fully customise your werewolf's pelt, with three layers of coat colours allowing you to combine as many hair colour swatches, as well as the option to simply airbrush over their coat with a series of pre-set stencils or even by drawing freehand. In other words, werewolves are now the most deeply customisable humanoids in The Sims 4. Which is, to coin a phrase, wild.

Now, I know that the werewolf designs in this game weren't universally well-received, but I really love the cartoonish art style the Sims team have gone with this time around. It makes werewolves in The Sims 4 visually distinct from their counterparts in the second and third games, and leans more heavily into actual animal transformation as opposed to the (dare I say it) slightly generic beastman vibes given off in the older games. And if they look like attendees at a furry convention, so what? No need to yuck anyone's yum.

Now that Sim!Scott was all dressed up and ready to go, it was time to take him for a spin in Live Mode. For research purposes, naturally I moved him into the new world added with the pack, which is called Moonwood Mill.

Moonwood Mill is on the smaller side, with just one neighbourhood containing five buildable lots. Still, the out-of-bounds areas of the town are quite well fleshed-out compared to worlds of a similar size added in older add-ons, particularly the other supernatural packs. Amenities include a werewolf sparring ground, a swimmable lake, a hill summit, two werewolf clubhouses, and a network of tunnels werewolves can explore for a spot of text-based choose-your-own-adventuring.

I got the impression that the dev team had built on the ideas behind the worlds in those previous game packs, drawing lessons from what worked and what didn't without changing the overall scope of what an occult-themed world offers. Moonwood Mill may not have more actual lots than Forgotten Hollow or Glimmerbrook, but there's less empty space in the world surrounding them. As in Realm Of Magic, ambient NPCs introduce unique interactions, and there's a bit more to do and see than just harvest collectables, even if there's nothing entirely original to this pack in those spaces between.

I got much the same impression of iteration and improvement from the core werewolf gameplay. Like vampires and spellcasters, werewolves have their own unique abilities tree with various lupine perks and behaviours they can unlock as they earn XP. Realm Of Magic had already added a few additional complications to the basic system introduced in Vampires, but Werewolves is definitely the deepest yet. In addition to the XP-based perk progression, there are also passive werewolf skills earned by performing specific gameplay feats, and every time your werewolf Sim levels up they'll gain a new behavioural complication that will affect how quickly their Fury gauge rises (more on that below).

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