Oh my, where do I even start with this one?
In case you missed it, The Sims released another kit for The Sims 4, called Industrial Loft Kit. It has, you guessed it, items to decorate an industrial loft. It’s available for $4.99 USD on Origin if you’d like to snag this new kit for yourself. I grabbed this kit when it dropped and spent some time exploring and building with it.
I should start by saying my feelings about kits in general are pretty lukewarm. I don’t love the concept but there’s been a couple packs that I really liked, such as Country Kitchen and Courtyard Oasis. I even liked Bust the Dust after they ironed out all the bugs with it. Others, like Throwback Fit left me extremely underwhelmed. Seeing as I’m not at all fond of the industrial look, I expected Industrial Loft to fall into the underwhelming category but I still tried to go in with an open mind. I’ve reviewed many packs I thought I would hate but changed my mind after playing with them.
I installed the new pack and hopped into Build/Buy to check out all of the new items. There are a total of 25 new items (21 if you count the ceiling lamps and modular pipes as one item each). All of the items were really reasonably priced, I was happy to see. I’ve found a lot of prices for objects in packs to be weirdly high for what the object is in the past which isn’t good for builders who don’t like to use money cheats or want to build within a budget for players who don’t use cheats. Considering most of these items look like they were made in a high school shop class, I was happy to see them priced accordingly.
As I started looking through the collection, I saw some stuff that caught my eye but not all of the items caught my eye for good reasons. Setting aside the bias I have against anything industrial, I noticed a distinct lack of swatches on a lot of the objects. The colour selections feel very limited and it’s difficult to pair them with a lot of other packs because of this. Some stuff works well with this kit but I had to dig through the catalogue pretty meticulously to find a decent variety of other packs this kit could pair nicely with. The only items I had an easy time mixing and matching were the rug, wall decal, and open French doors.
Still, I was most put off by what isn’t in the kit rather than anything that is actually in the kit. I understand that a $5 kit is only going to have a maximum of 20-25 items, which in my opinion, is a perfectly reasonable content to price ratio. However, any Build/Buy collection that does not include at least one wall covering and/or one floor covering is a huge miss. Especially for an industrial loft themed kit that relies heavily on textured brick and reclaimed wood to make the design work.
While I might be able to forgive the lack of walls and floors in a Build/Buy kit, what is unforgivable is showing us something in advertisements that is not even in the kit. We were shown a beautiful rounded window with loft-style panels in an early teaser for the Industrial Loft Kit. I was really looking forward to using this window. I thought it paired nicely with the windows from Moschino Stuff which I love and always wanted more variety of. Cue my confusion, then disappointment, then anger when I realised the window seen in the ads was not the window that came with the kit. Instead of that beautiful window, we got a pretty bare-bones looking window that was extremely similar to some base game windows we’ve had since 2014. The Sims Team has promised to add the missing window to the kit in a free Kit Patch but only after public backlash. Had no one complained, I doubt we ever would have gotten that window.
Then there’s the matter of the bed that comes with this kit only having an Energy rating of 1. This does appear to be just a typo, since Sims do gain energy at a normal rate for the price range of that bed but it still feels like players paid $5 for a collection of unpolished content that was rushed and cobbled together as an afterthought. In a kit where you only get a very small selection of items, each and every one of those items should be perfect with no glaring mistakes.
All in all, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth after exploring this wildly disappointing kit. It’s a shame because overall, I like to think I’m pretty positive about The Sims 4. It’s my favourite game in the series and more often than not, I really love the new content that gets released for it. I’ve even liked a few of the kits released so far even if I’m unsure about kits as a business model, but Industrial Loft?
This kit is downright shameful. The Sims needs to do better with its kits because false advertising and mislabeled objects is just not acceptable.