The Sims 4: For Rent - More Than Meets The Eye

If you’ve ever lived in an apartment with irksome neighbours, damp issues, unhelpful landlords, and sky-high bills then The Sims 4: For Rent may hit a little close to home, or perhaps rented accommodation is more fitting. As players take control of custom-built rental lots, becoming a career landlord is now an option, and being a bad one is so much easier than being a good one. Just like real life!

The Sims 4 has always embraced the darker sides of humanity. Sims can already be career criminals or villains, or use dastardly tricks to upset, hurt, or even kill other Sims. They can also choose to be lawyers or cops if they fancy being extra evil. Now, being a landlord joins the laundry list of despicable virtual occupations you can take on.

The New Sims 4 Expansion Lets You Be A Landlord, Which Is Too Evil Even For Me

I like to torment my Sims as much as the next guy, but damn.

In the Southeast Asian-inspired world of Tomarang, players can build their own small community with the new rental system. You can have up to six houses or apartments on one lot, offering a lot of flexibility to both builders and players. Core functionality of apartments remains, so when playing you will still see just your space in detail and the blank outline of other rental spaces on the same lot. You can also jump from one apartment to another without having to exit out to the world map, meaning the loading screens aren’t as obtrusive as feared.

When building you can select the new lot type and get started. However, if you start to separate out different rental spaces early on then this seems to cause performance issues and the game will slow to a crawl. The best way to build is to construct everything you want first, and then designate all the spaces afterward. You can have up to six rentals on one lot, with up to eight sims in each. It sounds restrictive, but the joy in this pack is in building small communities, and in being creative with the rental restrictions to make apartments and homes you may not see elsewhere. As a builder, I’ve already spent hours of my time constructing different combinations of houses and apartments to see how they look and function.

A bug - which will be fixed at launch - set the rent on one of my properties to over 4 billion simoleons! I had no idea my building skills were valued so highly...

The Sims 4 is about building communities, and this expansion focuses on that. Because you can designate any space at all as a rental it leaves you able to create a home with a room to let whether it’s a normal house, a bungalow, or an apartment block. The addition of shared spaces also means that Sims coming together is more common and a great feature for storytelling. You can add a shared balcony, garden, or community room and Sims who live in the same building will frequently use it.

There are also new community events including a charity gift drive, pool party, and potluck. These help neighbours bond, which is helpful because they don’t always get along. If you want to hinder your neighbours you can choose to eavesdrop on them in public areas too. Thanks to neighbourhood stories you will occasionally hear some juicy gossip and can choose to use this for blackmail if you so desire, because nothing says community spirit to find out your neighbour is cheating on his wife with the maid.

Visiting the interior of another apartment will trigger a short loading screen - similar to using the elevators in San Myshuno apartments - but you can enter shared spaces and the exterior neighbourhood without having to wait around.

Of course, you can choose to bypass these community interactions and instead become a monstrous live-in landlord as well as a tenant. Things will go wrong in your rental apartments, and as a landlord, you control how quickly and how well they get fixed, while as a tenant you are left to deal with the fallout. Apartment buildings can also have rules which you can be fined for breaking, leading to some tense moments if neighbours start to snitch on each other. Like real life once again, tenants will benefit from banding together to try and fight back against unfair landlords and their weird, often archaic rules.

For Rent has gone to great lengths to provide a spread of content for all kinds of players, so much so that I’ve only scratched the surface. For builders, it’s a chance to make lots with up to six homes on them as well as apartment blocks. While you cannot currently make hotel rentals, this expansion does open doors to the possibility, since multi-lot rentals and short-term rentals are now both in the game, they are just currently separate.

Tenants will use all the available community space, but it does increase the rent, so you'll need to balance both private and public space.

There’s also a nice range of furniture befitting the Southeast Asian theme. Enough to furnish most rooms and a good range of clutter to add a personal touch to any home either in or outside the expansion.

Not to be missed out, stylists will also be happy with new create-a-sim items, which have a heavy emphasis on tops and bottoms that are easy to mix and match across all genders. There are clothes for all ages, and most sections are covered, including jewelry and tattoos.

For Rent has similar vibes to past content packs like Eco Lifestyle. On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you start to explore the new mechanics, as well as the items, clothing, and the world it takes place in, there’s more here than I expected.

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