Jokes on us Simmers, the quarterly trailer did not show us everything the SimGurus had in store for us! To our delightful surprise EA announced another pack to come out in the first quarter of 2018: The Sims 4 My First Pet Stuff. This pack premiers a new concept as it is the first pack to ever add more for an already released expansion, The Sims 4 Cats & Dogs! So if you love to have animals around the house, this might be the perfect little addition to your game.
So now you might wonder: “What if I don’t own The Sims 4 Cats & Dogs?”. No worries, the pack will still be available to you! It just means that Cats & Dogs specific items such as litter boxes or pet beds will act like decorative items until you install the expansion. The rodent cages will be fully playable and ready for you to enjoy!
Create a Sim & Pet
The CAS items are a nice addition to your game. Even for Simmers who might not have all the other expansion packs installed, My First Pet Stuff will add a lot of outfits for your pets that work well with base game items. With cats & dogs each getting their own versions of specific outfits, your Sims will be able to truly dress their pets as themselves. It also gives the game a bit of an extra silliness factor, which I enjoy.
Talking about dressing the same as your pets… There are a few new outfits for kids and toddlers(!!) for us to play dress-up with. Do you remember that silly lizard-like outfit you could put on your smaller dogs? Kids can now join them in the lizard madness by wearing the same outfit! Imagine them roaming around the house together in their funny outfits, it’s too damn cute! My heart is melting.
What I really liked about the new outfits is that they came in swatches that are suitable for different times of the year. There are options for Christmas and even Day of the Dead, which gives My First Pet Stuff just that little bit extra. I can always appreciate content that I can play all year round, rather than just one specific period of time. Not that anyone stops me from throwing a Spooky party in the middle of summer, but… you know.
Of course My First Pet Stuff adds some standalone CAS items as well. Women and Men both get a new hairstyle to pick from. The female hairdo comes in a solid colored version and again one with funky colors, which I personally always enjoy to use. Like I mentioned before, toddlers were not left out of the pack which is a plus. Especially because toddlers now officially have the cutest hat on the planet to choose from.
Build & Buy
Most of the items are for Buy mode, which I personally find really lame. In Build mode, the only things added are the pet doors in a more modern style compared to the ones in Cats & Dogs. I love the doors, especially for Builders who enjoy a modern way of building, don’t get me wrong. I guess I was just hoping for some wallpapers, especially for kids. As I mentioned before in my The Sims 4 Cats & Dogs review, I would have loved an animal prints wallpaper of some sort.
Other than that I really enjoyed the new items from My First Pet Stuff. Especially if you own Cats & Dogs, it is a very nice pack to have as it works nicely with the items added before. For example, EA focused a lot on children in this pack and you can now complete their bedrooms from Cats & Dogs with more furniture with the same designs, such as a desk and activity table.
The designs of the Buy mode items are a lot more playful compared to the last few packs we’ve gotten. For the most part the items will have rounded edges and lots of colorful swatches to choose from, making them feel a little cartoony. A fat hamster chair, a pet bed with a huge rainbow on it or maybe a rug in the shape of a turtle, it all adds up to the playful vibe of the pack. As for Simmers who might like it a bit more toned down, there are enough neutral colored swatches and designs to pick from as well.
My personal favorite of Build & Buy must be the coffee table. It’s the first round coffee table of the game, but to make it even better… it’s a fish tank! It’s simply the eye catcher of any room and its design is amazing. There will be fishes swimming around in the tank, but unfortunately you won’t be able to add your own, which is a bit of a shame for Simmers who would like to have that option.
Gameplay
As per usual the pack will add a few new gameplay features as well. The most obvious one will be the new rodents that your Sims will be able to keep as pets. There are four types of rodents to pick from, in the form of rats, hamsters, hedgehogs and a bit more silly option: bubalus. You purchase their cages in Buy mode and you can stock the pen by an interaction in Life mode.
Taking care of them seems fairly easy and if you hover your mouse over the cages it will show you a tooltip about your little furry friends. It will show you information about their needs as well as things like their name. You will have to take good care of them as they can die from starvation, a sad but realistic feature of the My First Pet Stuff pack. If you want to know how to take care of your rodents, make sure to read our guide!
Your rodents will have their own secret lives that your Sims will not be fully aware of. Sometimes your Sims will randomly earn (or lose) money as a result of your rodents activities. In other instances you will find their cages empty as they flew off to their vacation destinations. Yep, I said flew. They will hilariously take a rocket ship to escape from their enclosures. Don’t worry, Pinky & the Brain will return to you eventually and they’ll even bring you some new postcards for you to collect! How nice of them.
Rabid Rodent Fever
The infamous Guinea Pig disease makes its comeback in The Sims 4, now renamed to Rabid Rodent Fever. Simmers might remember the illness from The Sims 1, where it wiped out complete neighborhoods as it was super contagious and… deadly. Luckily in The Sims 4 it is not as unpredictable as it used to be, but it is still can be as deadly as before.
Sims that come in contact with your sick Sims might get infected as well, you will see them around town showing signs of the illness, such as sneezing. However, it won’t kill unplayed Sims. This is to prevent a massive outbreak from happening, so it won’t lead to any accidental deaths from your beloved neighbors. I think this is a fair and safe choice from the SimGurus as it still simulates how the disease would spread if left untreated by your Sims, but at least it won’t wipe out every living being in town.
The new death is, how gruesome as it sounds, simply hilarious. Your Sim will start foaming from the mouth and eventually drop dead. Sims that passed away from the disease will show this in the afterlife by wearing a huge hamster costume, while still foaming from the mouth. You can later change back your Sims into their normal outfits. If you want know how to turn your ghosts back to normal or maybe how to cure or even prevent the disease, we’ve got you covered in our handy Rabid Rodent Fever guide!
Conclusion
The Sims 4 My First Pet Stuff is a cute and playful Stuff Pack. The Create a Sim as well as the Create a Pet items are a great addition to your game and it seems to be a perfect love triangle between The Sims 4 base game and Cats & Dogs together with this pack. Plenty of items refer to each other, making it a nice cohesive formula for the perfect pet-loving family.
The amount of items for Build & Buy might not be the greatest, but the quality makes up a lot for it. The colorful patterns are lovely, and the playfulness of each design makes the perfect for any family home. I would have loved some new wallpapers that go with the animal theme, so that’s a little negative thing I’d have to point out.
The main feature of My First Pet Stuff must be the rodents. The gameplay is fun and unique and Simmers won’t need Cats & Dogs for this to work. So all in all I think the pack would be enjoyable enough to play without the Cats & Dogs pack installed as the most important features are still available to you. The Rabid Rodent Fever is also a great throwback to previous Sims games, which I always appreciate.
The Sims 4 My First Pet Stuff is the first Stuff Pack that builds on an already existing pack. I personally was very excited about this, so you can imagine how surprised I was when I heard about all the backlash the SimGurus are getting about the pack. Usually content that comes out is finished completely, meaning nothing can be added to it, ever. How is it a bad thing EA choose to give us more content for our beloved Cats & Dogs? I just don’t see how this is something negative…
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that if you’d count all the money spent on Sims packs in total, then yeah.. it’s a lot. However, most Simmers will not purchase everything at once, that’s just an unrealistic situation and it happens rarely. It’s $10,- so to say it’s a money grabbing trick is just silly. I mean, just skip a couple of visits to your local Starbucks and you got yourself a new Sims 4 Stuff Pack right there.
