EA continues to face an uphill battle with its upcoming The Sims game for mobile as another playtest yields new screenshots and footage.
While EA has said it will never make The Sims 5, choosing to instead continuously update The Sims 4, the company still intends to release new Sims games, including Project Rene.
Billed as The Sims but with multiplayer, EA has yet to give it a proper name or release date. But leaked info from private playtests has already earned it a sour reputation among fans for its art style, with one playtester blasting it as boring.
Officially, EA hasn’t provided any updates on the project in months though it appears to have set up yet another playtest for mobile devices. Unfortunately, if EA had hoped to turn fans’ opinions around, it hasn’t worked.
The playtest was spotted over on the German Google Play store under the name City Life Game with Friends, where it launched about a week ago on March 26. There’s no sign of it on Apple’s app store so it’s exclusive to Android phones.
Despite the fake-sounding name, it’s definitely related to Project Rene since the screenshots on its store page match the leaks from previous playtests. Plus, EA is listed as the publisher, and you can see the iconic Sims green diamond (or plumbob) over the player character’s head in video footage uploaded to YouTube.
According to the official Sims Discord channel (as spotted by fan site Sims Community), the playtest is limited to certain regions and only set to last until April 4.
It sounds fundamentally identical to the last leaked playtest since it also involves you working in a café, though the store description mentions being able to throw block parties as well.
Regardless, it appears to have done little to get fans any more invested, with reactions on Reddit to the screenshots and video footage proving universally negative.
‘This is not going to be for me, I can tell already. It just seems so basic and I don’t want to play The Sims on my phone,’ reads the top comment by Simplyobsessed2.
The graphics remain a big sticking point, with one commenter simply labelling them as ‘vile’ while another says it ‘looks like those Russian content farm YouTube videos for babies.’
Given the timing of the footage’s upload to YouTube, a couple of fans seem to have mistaken it for an April Fool’s joke or at least wish it was.
‘This isn’t anything I’d care about and definitely isn’t ‘the next generation of The Sims,’ writes kaptingavrin, who believes EA will have to shift course and make a ‘proper’ Sims game anyway now that it has new competition in the form of inZOI.
A rare example of a game trying to emulate The Sims, inZOI quickly garnered a lot of attention on Steam thanks to its admittedly amazing graphics, shooting to the top of peoples’ wishlists.
It’s currently available in early access, meaning anyone can try it out for themselves (as long as you can get it running on your PC), meaning it’s already reaching a wider audience than Project Rene is with its limited playtests.
EA could manage to turn things around once Project Rene becomes more widely available, but these early impressions make it hard to be optimistic about the game’s chances.
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