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I know, everyone says so, but I can't write a TS4 review without saying so myself: BUY ON SALE ONLY!!
Now onto the pack, after checking the description and reviews I knew I was taking a major risk with this DLC, either it would improve the gaming experience or completely ruin it, but I went for it anyway. I got to say I got lucky, it was not just an improvement but a MAJOR improvement.
It should be obvious, if you don't play families this pack is worthless, but if you do, it fills some massive voids when playing minor sims. Yeah, you got the toddler skills and children aspirations but they always felt like a chore that I always got taken care of ASAP and move my sims to teen when they are basically adults with minor or no responsibilities. What this pack adds synergies with these activities, finally making them feel natural for both parent and child.
The good:
- Things you may already do like washing dishes or helping with homework will improve the respective skill
- School projects improve your child's performance AND at the same time will provide experience for certain skills like creativity for children, handiness, programming or rocket science (among others) for teen and adults, and any other sim assisting with the project will receive the same skill gain. The kind of efficiency this game sorely lacks.
- All five values can be build from toddler to teen, but some are way easier/harder on different ages. Responsibility is very easy as teen but almost impossible as toddler, on the other hand, unless you have a very troublesome teen, conflict resolution is very hard as teen but quite easy as toddler with the "teach to say sorry" interaction which ALSO builds communication skill.
- At high parenting level (9 or 10, don't remember) your parent sim gets a do-it-all-at-once interaction to care for babies/infants, this I love so I can get rid of their needs in 3 seconds and proceed to ignore them for the rest of the day.
- You choose your way to deal with your children, want to hug them all day? Go ahead. Want to abuse them and turn them into little devils? Go forth fam, give'em a smack on me.
- Without this pack, except for mean/evil teens, every other teen was a well-behaved lovely creature, now they are troublesome, and in my opinion if as a teen you are not troublesome you are not doing it right.
- Finally the five traits your sim can obtain once they become young adults are VERY POWERFUL. Responsibility for example, I consider it the easiest to build and maintain, it gives the Responsible trait which takes off your sim the daily task to improve work performance, it will almost always be automatically done, freeing your sim to do whatever they want with that extra time. Also they sometimes will get special work-events that no matter what you choose, it will always have a positive impact in your work performance, and that's only one of the traits.
The bad:
- Teaching moments come in the form of calls from school or the minor sim "asking for advice" and it feels like the game prefers to hand them to the parent with the lower parenting skill, hence not that many options to choose from, either not impacting positively a value you want to improve or impacting negatively a value you have been working hard to improve.
- A worse situation is if you have more adults in the household than the parents because they may (too often) get these calls for advice, messing up your progress.
- I try to avoid volunteering like the plague because they get something like work-events, if succeed will improve a value, if fail will decrease it. And they tend to fail A LOT!!
The ugly:
- "Think about a family member" gets on my nerves, it slows down your sim while doing other activities and to me it feels like is something a creep would do.
I appreciate if you took the time to read all that so I'll leave you with one final advice: BUY ON SALE ONLY!! (oh? did I say so already?)