InZoi has finally arrived in Early Access on Steam, and after much anticipation that Krafton’s life sim could be the first real competition for The Sims in decades, we are of course very eager to compare the two.
The reality, of course, is that any brand-new life sim is going to have a hard time going up against a title like The Sims 4, which has been out for a decade and has received dozens of DLCs over that span. It’s just not an even fight. With that being the case, a standard apples-to-apple comparison isn’t the best way to look at this competition between an old hat and an ambitious newcomer–that wouldn’t be fair. Instead, let’s drill down into what each game does best. While InZoi does still feel like a bit of an empty shell compared to The Sims 4, Krafton’s game already has certain features that EA probably cannot hope to match any time soon.
This is particularly true when it comes to customization. But at the same time, InZoi is still very far behind The Sims on the simulation side. Let’s drill down into these differences so we can better understand whether InZoi really can be an effective competitor to The Sims going forward.
InZoi is better: deep customization
At first, character creation in InZoi seemed more or less to be the same as it is in The Sims 4–then I discovered the real customization options, like the ability to design your own clothing items and upload images that you can use as textures for them. Turns out, you can also do the same stuff with any furniture you place in your house. InZoi essentially has built-in tools for creating custom content, whereas making this sort of stuff in The Sims 4 requires third-party mod tools. It’s a great inclusion and makes InZoi stand out in at least this one major way.
The Sims is better: It has much more “stuff”
While you can’t customize your clothes and furniture in The Sims 4 to the same degree that you can in InZoi, there isn’t the same need for it because there’s just so much stuff in The Sims 4. Every new expansion has added plenty of clothing and build mode items to the base game, so even people who have never spent a dime on The Sims 4 have regularly received new usable items for years. There’s so much stuff that the lack of deep, built-in customization doesn’t really hurt much.
InZoi is better: Everything is more granular
It’s not just the customization–everything in InZoi is at least a little bit more in-depth than their equivalent features in The Sims 4, from tiny features like the way your Zoi will use the dresser to change into pajamas before bed, to more impactful things like the way your home accumulates dust that has to be cleaned regularly. InZoi gets deep into the details in a surprisingly appealing way.
The Sims is better: a more intuitive build mode
InZoi’s granularity extends to its build mode tools, which is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, there are some things you can do with InZoi’s building tools that you can’t do in The Sims 4, but I’m not convinced it’s for the better for most folks, because even though you gain a little bit of granular usability, you lose some ease of use in the process. InZoi’s UI is fairly messy and has a steeper learning curve. Contrast that with build mode in The Sims 4, where you can manipulate any object by clicking it, and it’s clear that even though InZoi’s build mode is deeper, it’s harder to learn and to use.
InZoi is better: customizing your town
In The Sims, you have basically unlimited freedom to mess with any property lot in the game, but you can’t touch anything else–outside of lots, the many worlds of The Sims 4 are set in stone. InZoi goes the other direction, allowing players to mess with their cities as much as they want. You can use build mode anywhere you want, placing food trucks all over town so you’re never far from an emergency meal, for example. And in the Edit City menu you can make global changes, like filling your town with (peaceful) crocodiles or making it very dirty–or you could make your neighbors super mean or super nice. In The Sims 4, a lot of this stuff would be impossible even with mods.
The Sims is better: Pets
While InZoi will let you add stray dogs and cats to your city, you can’t interact with them much, and you can’t take any of them home with you because InZoi doesn’t support pets yet. The Sims 4 does, though they’re locked behind paid expansions (Cats & Dogs and Horse Ranch).
InZoi is better: the scheduler
Using InZoi’s scheduler, you can set up all your appointments each week, picking where you’ll go and at what time, and your Zoi will eagerly do all of it. The scheduler is only for out-of-home stuff, so you can’t use it to automate your Zoi’s entire life, but it definitely makes it easier to deal with large households, since this allows you to manually automate most of their activities ahead of time if you want to.
The Sims is better: A much more coherent simulation
The Sims 4 is a video game version of real life and has more or less the same sort of social dynamics we have to deal with in society. For example, if you cheat on your spouse, they’ll probably, at the very least, get really mad and say mean things about you to their friends, hurting your reputation and making other people like you less. It’s a funhouse mirror for reality.
This is something InZoi is missing in a big way–any meaningful sense of cause and effect. There are plenty of things to do, but little point in doing them. You can get a job, but it won’t require any skills, and you won’t make useful amounts of money from it. You can have relationships, but jealousy barely exists as a concept in this universe, which makes that aspect kinda boring. Learning to play one musical instrument automatically makes you know how to play all other musical instruments, too. The simulation side of InZoi is like this through and through.
InZoi is better: More immersion
One quirk of InZoi’s control scheme is how it makes use of the WASD keys to walk your character around, a feature that drove me crazy during my first few hours playing because in The Sims 4, WASD moves the camera. But when you combine that control quirk with an over-the-shoulder view, which you bring up by pressing Tab, you suddenly have the ability to walk around town like you’re playing some kind of third-person walking simulator. The Sims 4 has no comparable feature, which makes it an exceptionally interesting thing for InZoi to include.
The Sims is better: It’s a completed game
We can compare and contrast The Sims 4 and InZoi all week, but while InZoi definitely has some innovative new features that could make it an essential entry in the life sim genre, it’s not going to dethrone EA’s long-running franchise right now. The Sims 4 will win every current, overall comparison between the two games simply because InZoi is an Early Access release and really feels like one–it’s more like the framework of a game at this point. That framework is extremely promising in some key respects, but it needs a lot more work before it feels all that fun to live in.