It is amazing to think that in an industry where success generates simulation, there has not been a viable alternative to the Sims in the 25 years of series history.
While there are many ‘Sims de Life’, they tend to go in different directions, whether the gameplay centered on the Stardew Valley farm or the … UM, the Disney Dreamlight Valley game, but very few have tried to offer something that directly competes with the EA series.
That competitor has finally arrived, in the form of South Korea’s life, Sim Inzoi. The game enters Steam Early Access next week, and from what I have played about it there is a lot of reach here to become something special.
The game opens asking you to believe your sim … I’m sorry, your zoi, using the creation of ridiculously detailed characters that may have seen before doing the rounds. While there are a series of pre -established characters among which you can choose, the large amount of sliding controls and customization options means that I can certainly see that there is a community of players who rarely go beyond this screen and spend all their time doing and sharing celebrities zois.
Watch our play of Inzoi playback, showing the first 30 minutes …
After this, he is in his choice of cities: they offered us three fictitious areas in a southern Korea metropolis, an Indonesian holiday destination and an American coastal city, completed with amusement park next to the beach. Opting to live my fantasies of Coney Island, I moved my zoi to the sunny American city of Bliss Bay, then I chose my reasonably large map house.
The level of effort you want to make to move depends on you. You can choose between a house that is already furnished, a house without furniture or an empty lot where you have to build your home from scratch. The mode of construction of the game house is quite detailed, with a reasonable help of walls and partial walls of different heights, as well as the usual things you would expect, such as doors and stairs.
If you do not like the idea of being too granular, you can choose between a series of pre -established room forms, from basic rectangles to octagonal and H -shaped rooms, and join them with doors. If you want something more specific, you can modify the shape of the rooms once you have placed them, or add things like platforms and handrails to give your room your extra character.
A wide variety of furniture is available to select and customize: if you do not like the type of wood that your dining table is made of you, you can choose between 13 different types, and if you are the extremely borning guy who is not yet happy with that, you can even load your own texture, something that extends to most furniture, walls and art you can add.
There is also a furniture elaboration section where you can choose different components and mix them. Do you want a frog chair (a wink to the crossing of animals) but with legs with wheels like an office chair? That can be organized, like a strange floor lamp with a Jack O’LANTERN tone and a robot body for a base.
However, it is the 3D printer mode of the game where things really advance (and will have eyebrows that rise from certain Internet corners). When taking a picture of an object and importing it to the game, Inzoi will use AI to discover the rest of the dimensions of the object and turn it into a 3D model that you can then place in your home. I tried it with the toy Tom Nook Build-A-Bear of my daughter and the results were surprisingly decent for the work of 60 seconds.
The real act of controlling your character also shares more than its fair part of similarities with the EA game. You can click several objects or people, presenting a contextual list of potential actions. These are placed in the lower part of the screen, with their zoi, making their way through them in a family way for anyone who has played a Sims title.
Its zoi also has an optional free will, and although they have the statistics of usual needs such as hunger, hygiene, sleep, etc., there is a little pleasant trick to click one of them will automatically move their zoi to the closest place that can be addressed. That means that if your zoi is in the city and suddenly realizes that they are hungry desperately, by clicking on the hunger indicator that will immediately go to, for example, a close hamburger restaurant. If there is nothing close immediately, they will jump to a bus and go home with the fridge.
Speaking of the city, its zoi can also be controlled with the Wasd keys and mice, turning the experience into an open world game sometimes: the simulation of autonomous life of Grand Theft, if you wish (but please not, that was terrible). In a PC with high specifications, lighting and shadows are magnificent and, although there is a degree of appearance as stop signs and other objects appear in the distance, given their early access state, there is time to improve.
You will also want to explore the city, because there is a decent amount of things to do here. Bliss Bay Alone has a school (for younger zois), a park, the attraction park mentioned above, a beach, a city square, a fortune teller, an art gallery, a photographic studio, a hotel, an art gallery and a volleyball court between numerous other stores and services, and the big thing is that Inzoi gives enough time to explore them.
While I can’t speak for the Sims 4 because I have not played it, one of the things that always frustrated me about the previous entries was that once its SIM has a job, every day in the game it is so short that when you get home there is not much time left to do much more than overcome your Sim needs, doing an activity to boost your skills and then prepare them for the bed. He would see mass party captures and, instead of getting excited about them, I would think “that it looks like a nightmare to configure and bet that it only lasts 10 minutes.”
Without a doubt, there are modifications to remedy this, but Inzoi addresses it by default. Every day lasts 96 minutes in real time, taking much longer to explore the city, chat with the locals and the like. If that is not even enough, it can be changed at any time 4 hours from real life per day, or even 24 hours frankly ridiculous, which makes the game essentially execute in real time. Or, if you really prefer the shortest days of the Sims, you can reduce it to 48 minutes per day.
At this stage, there is still much to explore in Inzoi, and since it will be launched in early access on March 28, it still does not feel good to apply a score. I need to spend more time with him to see how he develops in multiple life cycles: having children, death and the like, especially because ghosts come into play at some point.
When you get to early access, it will cost $ 40, and developer Inzoi Studios says that all DLC planned during early access will be free, including four updates in May, August, October and December. The planned updates will add modification tools for Maya and Blender, an adoption system, swimming pools, independent works and a memory system, so when everyone is added, the game can be very different, assuming that it has not been “launched” officially by then.
It also remains to be seen how a game with such a loose structure will continue to involve players in the long term. While there are many Sims players who like to focus on their own role -playing houses and worship what is offered here, others prefer to play the Sims following their progression systems, working on the employment staircase, having a family and the like. While these are also here, they do not feel so pressing, and I wonder if the lack of pressure could see the players get away over time.
Until now, I am very happy with what Inzoi has to offer. The personalization level is impressive, and has the potential to really exploit when players begin to share their creations, and is visually surprising, even if at the moment it lacks some mood of the Sims. We will continue watching as the updates arrive, but in regards to early access, this is a start as strong as it could have expected.
