We’re not exactly bowling fans, so we weren’t expecting The Sims 4: Bowling Night Stuff to turn us into people who spend every Friday evening throwing balls at pins. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have quite a bit of fun with it, though. We started by taking our Sims to an existing bowling alley and later decided to build one of our own. Both experiences showed us why this little Stuff Pack works better than we expected.
What is a Sunday Sims Spotlight?
A weekly article designed to inform The Sims community through a detailed look at expansions and numerous add-ons for the cult simulation game. We inform you about what works best in terms of mechanics and all the things you might encounter for decorating your home.
Bowling has its own five-level skill, allowing Sims to gradually get better. They unlock different bowling balls, but, more importantly, they become less likely to embarrass themselves with gutter balls and failed throws. There are different game lengths, trick shots, strikes and spares, while children get bumpers to help them along. We have to admit that those few days of spending time with the DLC were quite fun, especilly watching our Sim improve, even if, sadly, we never quite reached the point where bowling became something we wanted to keep doing for hours.
A nice little date night
Taking a couple to the bowling alley is a great date. While one Sim is bowling, the other can hang around, socialize and enjoy the atmosphere. The whole thing feels more like an evening out than a room containing a couple of bowling lanes, especially when you so how other Sims are doing their own thing around the venue. Moonlight Bowling adds some extra atmosphere, with the neon lighting giving the venue that slightly cheesy bowling-alley feeling. We liked it, especially when we were playing as a couple. It isn’t a huge gameplay addition, but that doesn’t mean that the activity isn’t interesting. Nine year later, moments like the screenshot bellow are still really cool:
Building our own bowling alley
The Build/Buy selection fits the theme nicely, with bowling-related decorations, furniture and plenty of neon lighting. There are 35 Build/Buy items and 20 Create-a-Sim items, although neither category particularly blew us away. Everything looks perfectly fine and works well with the retro bowling aesthetic, but we didn’t find many objects that made us want to start redesigning our other lots around them.
The CAS content is much the same. There are some fun retro-inspired clothes, hairstyles and bowling gear, and we can see how players who like that particular style could get plenty of use out of them. They just didn’t intrigue us very much.
Simple, but well put together
There wasn’t much to complain about during our time with Bowling Night Stuff. The bowling worked, our Sims behaved as expected and we personally didn’t run into any bugs or particularly annoying behaviour.
The bigger problem is longevity. We had fun taking our Sims bowling, enjoyed seeing the skill progress, liked the atmosphere and even enjoyed building our own alley. After experiencing all of that, though, we didn’t feel much urge to keep coming back. The five-level skill gives us something to work towards, but, we feel there isn’t enough variety around the central activity to make bowling a permanent part of our Sims’ lives.
We’re still not bowling fans, but we were happy to spend some time with it and we had a good time while we did. Have you tried the pack? What’s your take on it?
Thank you for reading! See you next Sunday!
Developer: Maxis
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release date: March 29, 2017
Genre: Life Simulation / Stuff Pack
Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Build/Buy: 35 items
Create-a-Sim: 20 items
Bowling skill: 5 levels
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