The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Review: Let’s Get Down to Business

A new Expansion Pack for The Sims 4 is always an exciting time for fans to enjoy brand-new content for the game. The Businesses & Hobbies pack brings deeper, more involved small business ownership to The Sims 4, along with a handful of new hobbies for Sims to enjoy. The expansion includes the new Scandinavian-inspired Nordhaven neighborhood, which has a clean, minimalist design. This newest addition to The Sims 4 brings in a few long-requested features, including the ability to create more customized tattoos and mixed-use lots that can be both business and residential. Though Businesses & Hobbies can feel a bit small compared to other recent Expansion Packs, the content it does offer is polished and executed well. 

I’m the kind of Simmer who lacks the interior or exterior design abilities to build beautiful homes for my Sims, so my tour of Nordhaven began with noticing there’s only one pre-built Residential lot. Naturally, my new Sim moved in there, and I will say the one home on offer in Nordhaven is beautifully designed using items from the new pack. For Simmers who love getting immersed in build mode, Nordhaven’s four unoccupied, empty lots will no doubt offer great potential for designing the home business of your dreams. Those who, like me, just want a pretty space to pop their Sims right into, might be a bit put off by the lack of pre-built lots in this pack. In addition to the residential offering, there is also one empty Small Business lot that Sims can buy, if they want to set up shop near the local park. This is a nice touch for those who don’t want to try and run their cat cafe out of the tiny pre-built Residential lot on offer. 

Once my Sim got settled in her new home, naturally, it came time to pick a Small Business to run. The pack offers a decent list of options to choose from when assigning the business type, from Cat Cafe to Tattoo Parlor and beyond. After you select an option, you can further customize the business by choosing which activities customers will do while there. For my cat cafe, I selected socializing with pets and enjoying coffee and baked goods. These options let Simmers go beyond the basic offering labels to create a more fine-tuned business to suit their goals. Honestly, I was pretty impressed with how robust the Small Business menu is. Having tried without much success to run bakeries using the retail lot models of yore, this is a massive step up for Entrepreneurial-minded Sims. The ability to pick and choose what customers should expect from the business makes it feel much more dynamic. Whereas business lots could really only sell items before, customers now pay a fee to engage with services, which opens up the possibilities. 

The day-to-day business operations also run more smoothly with the Businesses & Hobbies pack than they did before. Customers actually behave properly when in the shop, doing the chosen activities and making purchases. This is a huge step up from running retail lots before the pack, which almost never worked as intended. After several days of opening up my new Cat Cafe, I still hadn’t run across any major glitches or errors that got in the way of operations. This let me actually settle in and enjoy pretending to be the tattooed Cat Cafe owner I’ve always secretly dreamed of being. 

At the end of each business day, you get a report about what customers like and dislike about your business. Here, I ran into a bit of a snag, as customers didn’t like the ambiance. Truthfully, neither did I. No matter what I did, the main areas of my lot just seemed… dark. The lighting was off, no matter how much I toggled auto-lights on and off or added light fixtures. This may be a glitch with Nordhaven or with some of the new pack items, but at any rate, it was a bit frustrating for me as a player – especially when my customers wouldn’t stop complaining about it. 

Now, what of the hobbies portion of The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies? The additions here are a bit lackluster compared to the complete overhaul businesses received. Sims can learn pottery and tattooing, which double as new avenues for business ventures as well. The pottery skill is well-designed, with a pottery wheel and the option to glaze pottery once it’s finished. There’s a good handful of pottery designs and glazes to keep things interesting, and it’s nice to have a new creative skill for Sims to learn. Candy Making, on the other hand, is more of another appliance than a hobby. Using it creates new, colorful treats your Sim can eat or sell, but it just builds on the Cooking skill rather than adding a new Candy Making one. Given the number of cooking-based skills already in the game, this makes sense, but it does take “hobbies” dangerously close to a singular here. 

That said, tattooing saves the day for many Simmers, who’ve been asking for this for a long time. Your Sims can learn to tattoo their friends or customers, and leveling up in the skill even unlocks a few special designs in Create-a-Sim. The tattoo expansion also adds new options to Create-a-Sim regardless of whether you partake in the new hobby. This is a pretty impressive addition, with plenty of new tattoo designs and placement options. You can also create your own using stencils or the free-draw option. Being not so artistically inclined myself, I appreciated the stencils for adding a bit of creative flair to my Sim’s ink without needing to draw anything freehand. This, along with the deeper Small Business gameplay, is the major accomplishment of Businesses & Hobbies. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also touch on the new Create-a-Sim and Build Mode options added with The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies. As previously noted, the new items in Build Mode are elegant with a minimalist touch, but there aren’t very many of them. The main focus is on new, Small Business-focused additions like open signs, kiosks, and display cases. Beyond that, there are a few new furniture and decor items, but it’s a pretty short list. Create-a-Sim is a similarly pared-back addition this time around, with the new tattoo options being the biggest change. There are some new outfits and new hairstyles, but the focus of this particular expansion is clearly the new mechanics. Thankfully, those mechanics are quite well thought out, and I can see myself spending hours unlocking all the Small Business Perks for my cat cafe even if I’ll be reaching into older packs to decorate it. 

In all, The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies is a solid Expansion when it comes to adding new mechanics for running small businesses. These features do as intended and add a level of depth to gameplay for Simmers who enjoy this style of play. For those looking for a massive new world full of new pre-built lots and items, it may not quite live up to its price tag, but for aspiring Sim Tycoons, this pack will feel like a dream come true. 

Rating: 3 out of 5

The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies was reviewed on PC via the EA App. A review copy was provided by the publisher in advance for the purpose of this review.