InZOI review in progress: The Sims finally gets some real competition

It’s staggering to think that in an industry where success breeds simulation, there hasn’t been a viable alternative to The Sims in the series’ 25-year history.

While there are plenty of ‘life sims’ out there, they tend to go in different directions – be that the farm-focused gameplay of Stardew Valley or the… um, farm-focused gameplay of Disney Dreamlight Valley – but very few have ever tried to offer something that directly competes with EA’s series.

That competitor has finally arrived, in the shape of South Korean developed life sim InZOI. The game enters Steam Early Access next week, and from what I’ve played of it there’s a hell of a lot of scope here to become something special.

The game opens by asking you to create your Sim… sorry, your Zoi, using the ridiculously detailed character creation suite you may have previously seen doing the rounds. While there are a number of preset characters you can choose from, the sheer number of sliders and customisation options means I can certainly see there being a community of players who rarely go beyond this screen and spend all their time making and sharing Zois of celebrities.

Watch our InZOI First Play video, showing the first 30 minutes…

After this, it’s onto your choice of cities – we were offered three fictional areas in a South Korean metropolis, an Indonesian holiday destination and an American coastal city, complete with beachside amusement park. Opting to live out my Coney Island fantasies, I moved my Zoi into the sunny US city of Bliss Bay, then chose my house from the reasonably large map.

The level of effort you want to put into moving in is up to you. You can either choose from a home that’s already furnished, a home with no furniture in it or an empty lot where you have to build your house from scratch. The game’s house building mode is quite detailed, with a reasonable helping of walls and partial walls of varying heights, as well as the usual stuff you’d expect like doors and stairs.

If you don’t like the idea of getting too granular you can choose from a series of preset room shapes – from basic rectangles to octagonal and H-shaped rooms – and join them together with doors. If you want something more specific you can then modify the shape of the rooms once you’ve placed them, or add things like platforms and handrails to give your room extra character.

A wide variety of furniture is available to select and customise: if you don’t like the type of wood your dining table is made out of you can choose from 13 different types, and if you’re the extremely picky type who’s still not happy with that you can even upload your own texture, something that extends to most of the furniture, walls and art you can add.

There’s also a furniture crafting section where you can choose different components and mix them together. Want a froggy chair (a nod to Animal Crossing) but with wheeled legs like an office chair? That can be arranged, as can a bizarre floor lamp with a jack o’lantern shade and a robot body for a base.

It’s the game’s 3D printer mode where things really get advanced (and will have eyebrows raising from certain corners of the internet), however. By taking a photo of an object and importing it into the game, InZOI will use AI to figure out the rest of the object’s dimensions and turn it into a 3D model which you can then place in your home. I tried it with my daughter’s Tom Nook Build-a-Bear toy and the results were surprisingly decent for 60 seconds’ work.

The actual act of controlling your character also shares more than its fair share of similarities with EA’s game. You can click on various objects or people, bringing up a contextual list of potential actions. These are then queued up at the bottom of the screen, with your Zoi working their way through them in a fashion familiar to anyone who’s played a Sims title.

Your Zoi also has optional free will, and while they have the usual Needs stats like Hunger, Hygiene, Sleep etc, there’s a nice little gimmick where clicking one of them will automatically move your Zoi to the nearest place it can be catered for. That means if your Zoi is out in the town and suddenly realises they’re desperately hungry, by clicking the Hunger gauge they’ll immediately head for, say, a nearby burger restaurant. If there’s nothing immediately close, they’ll jump into a bus and head home to the fridge.

Speaking of the town, your Zoi can also be controlled with the WASD keys and mouse, turning the experience into more of a third-person open world game at times – Grand Theft Autonomous Life Simulation, if you will (but please don’t, that was terrible). On a PC with high specs, the lighting and shadows are magnificent and while there’s a degree of pop-in as Stop signs and other objects appear in the distance, given its Early Access status there’s time for improvement.

You’ll want to explore the town, too, because there’s a decent amount of things to do here. Bliss Bay alone has a school (for younger Zois), a park, the aforementioned amusement park, a beach, a town square, a fortune teller, an art gallery, a photo studio, a hotel lounge, an art gallery and a volleyball court among numerous other shops and amenities, and the great thing is that InZOI gives you enough time to explore them.

While I can’t speak for The Sims 4 because I haven’t played it, one of the things that always frustrated me about the previous entries was that once your Sim has a job, each in-game day is so short that by the time they get home there’s not a lot of time left to do much else beyond topping up your Sim’s needs, doing an activity to boost their abilities then getting them ready for bed. I would see screenshots of mass parties and rather than get excited about them, I’d just think “that looks like a nightmare to set up and I bet it only lasts 10 minutes”.

No doubt there are mods to remedy this, but InZOI addresses it by default. Each day lasts 96 minutes in real time, giving you a lot more time to explore the town, chat to the locals and the like. If that’s not even enough it can be changed at any time to a hefty 4 real-life hours per day, or even a frankly ridiculous 24 hours, making the game essentially run in real time. Or, if you actually prefer the shorter days of The Sims, you can bring it down to 48 minutes per day.

At this stage, there’s still a lot to explore in InZOI, and since it’s launching in Early Access on March 28 it doesn’t quite feel right to apply a score to it yet. I need to spend more time with it to see how it plays out over multiple life cycles – having kids, death and the like – not least because apparently ghosts come into play at some point.

When it arrives on Early Access it’ll cost $40, and developer InZOI Studios says all planned DLC during the Early Access will be free, including four updates coming in May, August, October and December. Updates planned will add the likes of modding tools for Maya and Blender, an adoption system, swimming pools, freelance jobs and a memory system, so by the time these are all added the game may look very different, assuming it hasn’t officially ‘launched’ by then.

It also remains to be seen how a game with such a loose structure will continue to engage players long-term. While there are plenty of Sims players who like to focus on their own roleplays and will adore what’s on offer here, others prefer to play The Sims by following its progression systems, working up the employment ladder, having a family and the like. While these are here too, they don’t feel as pressing, and I wonder whether a lack of pressure could see players drifting away over time.

So far though, I’m really happy with what InZOI has to offer. The level of customisation is impressive – and has the potential to really blow up when players start sharing their creations – and visually it’s extremely striking, even if at the moment it’s lacking some of the humour of The Sims. We’ll continue to keep an eye on it as the updates roll in, but as far as Early Access goes, this is as strong a start as I could have hoped for.