The Sims 4: Snowy Escape

Continuing the long tradition of adding more stuff to do with your virtual townspeople, The Sims 4: Snowy Escape offers more wintery entertainment for your Sims. More than just another vacation pack, Snowy Escape adds some truly fascinating Asian locales that really expand upon the barebones Sims 4 experience.

Still, even though this expansion offers a healthy amount of new content for the game, the quality of some of it is questionable at best. Is this a necessary expansion pack? Probably not, but that never applies to the average die-hard Sims fan.

Winter Wonderland

As the name implies, The Sims 4: Snowy Escape is all about the winter lifestyle. The star of the show in this expansion pack is Mt. Komorebi — a new location based on Mt. Fuji. Your Sims can venture into this snowy mountain to discover enlightenment, or just to enjoy a cold/hot day at the spa.

These visits still lack the depth we got in games like The Sims 3: World Adventures, but they’re still a definite upgrade over the base Sims 4 experience. Now, something that really lacks a bit of polish is the new neighborhood where your Sims can live.

Gray and Cold

When I first heard that the new neighborhood in Snowy Escape would be a Japanese-themed locale, I got my hopes up. At last, my sims could live in a Japanese setting without mods — something that players have been trying to do since the first The Sims expansion packs came around.

What we got, however, was a hugely disappointing town that’s just as gray as my hopes for ever getting a proper Japanese town in The Sims. With only a handful of bars and a spa, the new neighborhood is as barebones as they come. At least it offers easy access to Mt. Komorebi, giving players who just want to try the expansion pack a good taste of what Snowy Escape is all about.

Dubious Performance

As much as I love The Sims 3, that game is infamous for how poorly it performs on pretty much every computer. With its true open world and superior visuals, running The Sims 3 is significantly more demanding than playing The Sims 4.

However, for some reason, Snowy Escape introduces some performance issues that I would’ve expected to see in The Sims 3, but never in this game. Still, if you’ve played the previous game, then you’ll know that long loading times and FPS dips are pretty much an integral part of the Sims expansion pack experience by now.

Pros

• Cool Japanese-inspired furniture
• Mt. Komorebi is fun to explore
• New animations and interactions

Cons

• Performance issues
• Lacks meaningful new content
• Disappointing new neighborhood