We all know it's one of the main attractions of The Sims as a concept, the ability to completely rebuild the house you live in. Or the freedom to completely build your dream mansions for your little computerised action-figures to spend their existence in. The Sims 3 made great advances in this regard, allowing basements, outhouses, and other more unusual building patterns in a natural progression from the previous entries in the series. It's no longer the case. The options that are there seem to have become slightly more complex and interesting, but it's a fraction of what used to be there as a lot of options have been completely removed. Basements are gone, so don't even consider building that woo-hoo dungeon you've wanted for all this time. No longer can you build above two stories, although the attic choices are slightly improved to compensate. The number of material options when building has been decimated, whilst strange objects have far too many options - oven hoods have 19 options! Normal objects like dishwashers and trash compactors? Completely gone. There is also a strange lack of freedom when building your house in that you cannot really define what you want a part of the building to be. The system operates in a stranger style, where a set area is defined as the kitchen, and a set area is defined as the lounge. All in all, EA Maxis seriously messed up their strongest component of their strongest franchise.
