When the long hoped-for Sims 4: Horse Ranch expansion pack released in July 2023, I briefly thought I would be on time and relevant with a review for once. I bought the game, played a decent amount, took notes and screenshots and recordings to prepare for writing a review… And then I got distracted by Baldur’s Gate 3 for a few weeks, and then I got put on sick leave and had to put all work on hold for a few months. So here we are, nine months later.
My in-depth look at the Horse Ranch pack may no longer be timely, but it will be overly elaborate and familiarly pedantic about equine accuracy. You know, on brand.
A note about Play Style and Custom Content: All The Sims games, including this particular expansion pack, have a thriving mod community around them. The Sims games can be enjoyed in a lot of different ways, and there are those for whom modding and roleplaying are the main appeal of this game. I don’t avoid custom content altogether, but this review will focus on what the vanilla expansion pack offers without player-created additions.
The joys of The Sims usually begin in its extensive character creation, and Horse Ranch is no exception to that. While you can buy, rescue or breed horses later in the game, the Create-A-Sim (CAS) interface is the place to get creative and customize your dream horse.
Horse Ranch gives you options to pick a horse breed as a template, then lets you edit its body shape, coat color, mane and tail styles, equipment and personality.
The number of horse breeds to choose from is noteworthy: Thirty-five pre-made breed templates exist, all based on real-life breeds from Akhal-Teke to Welsh Cob. Well, almost all based on real life breeds. It also includes “Palomino” for some reason, which is a color, not a breed. No breed could be purely palomino horses because in real life, pairing two palominos together only has about a 50% chance of resulting in another palomino, the other options being 25% chestnut and 25% cremello, because of how coat color genetics work. But I digress. The options to select breeds in The Sims 4: Horse Ranch are solid, but they function more as a starting off point to further customize your horse, rather than locking you into anything.
Breed is a solely aesthetic template in the game. Even if you choose a specific breed and don’t edit it further, the horse doesn’t retain it as a defining characteristic, there’s no concept of pure-bred horses, and horse personality traits have no association with specific breeds. I’m not taking issue with this, but it’s perhaps worth knowing that the word “breed” is used somewhat loosely.
Apart from real-life inspired breeds and colors, Horse Ranch also gives you complete freedom to paint a coat color directly onto your horse’s body. For me, that’s a decent way to add white leg markings of any kind, or to make the fugliest horse you’ve ever seen. But fortunately, there are vastly more artistically skilled players out there who use this functionality to edit custom coats and share them via the gallery function.
The functionalities for custom painting, stamps and stencils to put onto your horse are powerful tools for creative players to customize their steeds on a pixel-by-pixel basis. At the same time though, I found myself wishing for more variety in pre-made, realistic looking combinations of coat colors and markings. Don’t get me wrong, it is very cool that I have the option to paint my own horse’s white patterns, and I love the options this opens up for customization, but I personally would have been glad to get a few more ready-made Tobiano variations and some primitive Dun markings. I’ll add that the dappled horse varieties are very cute though.
When it comes to your horse’s “outfits”, options are somewhat limited: there are two bridles, two Western saddles, one English saddle, and one saddle pad for each style. All these items come in various color combinations, so there’s definitely some ways not to have all horses look the same. I respect the game’s choice not to feature bridles with bits, but even so there would have been space for a lot more variety: from hackamores to bosals to sidepulls to stall halters to rope halters, there are plenty of bitless headstalls with a distinct shape that would have made for interesting additions.
This lack of variety also applies to clothing options for the human sims: There are a few good basics with jeans and vests, cowboy hats and helmets. I really like that there’s a short boots and half-chaps combo – that’s what I wear when riding in real life and most riding games don’t have it as an option. At the same time, other obvious staples are entirely missing, like simple English leather riding boots or something like breeches or riding leggings that can be combined with any top.
There’s further annoyances about the horses themselves that are immediately noticeable in CAS: the saddle position is way too far back, partly because the neck and withers are too far back as well. The saddle girth should be directly behind the foreleg, not 20cm behind it. On some breeds, the horses’ eyes are bizarrely large and set almost halfway down the head. This can fortunately be changed in the game’s detail edit mode, which I only found on my second or third attempt at character creation.
All in all, the Sims 4 horse models aren’t bad, but their stylization veers on the side of too cartoony for my taste, in ways that don’t seem entirely intentional.
Something else that many players miss is height variety: Clydesdales are just as tall as Arabians in the game, and pony breeds are completely absent. Making every animation work with various heights is not trivial from a technical standpoint though, so I’m more willing to forgive this one.
Once my newly created household actually moves into their new home at the huge Red Roan Field lot, I of course immediately try out every possible interaction sims can do with their horses. Horses can’t be controlled directly (not without mods, at least), but your sims can call them to places, instruct them to eat, or encourage them to socialize with other horses, which gives the player decent control over what your horses are doing.
Once mounted, human sims begin training their Horse Riding skill. Levelling up said skill doesn’t only come with neat perks such as being able to instruct the horse to train jumping or agility by themselves, it also impacts the riding animation. While amateur riders bounce around in an awkwardly hunched position on their horse and have a good chance to get thrown off when mounting, more proficient Sims have a vastly smoother and more confident seat. I love when games acknowledge that riding is a skill to be learned – one of my first TMQ articles was lamenting that this wasn’t done often enough – and that fits perfectly within existing Sims mechanics. Unfortunately, even a Sim with their Riding Skill maxed out doesn’t manage to hold the reins the right way around though.
When mounted, Sims can choose to walk, trot or canter anywhere on the map, or they can go on a ride out through the neighborhood. This is good for the horse’s Fun need, makes horse-loving sims happy and trains the horse’s endurance skill.
When multiple horses are left to their own devices, they tend to socialize with each other, which I always greatly appreciate seeing in games. Horses are highly social animals, and yet interactions between them are left out of horse games far too often.
The socialization between Sims and their horses trains the horse’s Temperament skill, which is a neat way to reward you for horse socialization, but is a bit cheapened by the fact that all socialization – from picking the horse’s hooves to telling it a joke – has the exact same impact from what I can tell. This isn’t bad, but it would just have been so much cooler for Sims to do something like actual ground work with the horses, or for more options and cute animations to become possible as the relationship deepens.
The animations associated with all these behaviors, from simple movement to socialization, are essentially accurate, but quite cartoony and sometimes a bit too wobbly for my taste. Exaggerating motion for increased visibility and characterization is a fundamental part of stylized animation, but the Sims 4 horses just fall into “looks off” territory at too many points in their behavior.
Like human sims, horses have a handful of traits and preferences that impact their behavior: A Needy horse will require more attention in order to keep its social needs met for example, while an Independent horse is the opposite. Other traits influence how quickly the horses level up their skills, how they react to their environments and how easily they make friends. Horses have Hunger, Energy, Fun, Social and Hygiene needs, which the player has to provide for. Owning multiple horses means they generally cover their Fun and Social needs by themselves, while Hygiene needs to be taken care of by sims via the grooming and hoof picking interactions.
There’s no right or wrong way to play The Sims, but one thing the Horse Ranch expansion sort of invites the player to do is to get a horse or two, give one of your human sims an Championship Rider Aspiration, and play through the process of maxing out your horses skills in order to win competitions.
Horses in The Sims 4: Horse Ranch have four skills: Temperament, Endurance, Agility and Jumping. The first two are trained through socialization with the horse and going on “intense” rides through the neighborhood respectively, while there are dedicated obstacles to train the latter two.
I can have my sims mount a horse and interact with a set of barrels or an obstacle to train, which the sim and horse then do until a barrel or pole falls down, at which point I can fix it and try again. In what’s quickly becoming a theme for this review, this is fine but could have been so much cooler. In Sims 3: Pets, the previous time horses made their way into this franchise, the player could combine multiple jumping obstacles to create a course. This time around, your horse will stand before the obstacle, take a running jump, stop, turn and try again, with no option to jump multiple obstacles in a row.
For barrel racing, the horse simply rounds two barrels, ignoring the fact that this discipline literally has one iconic three-barrel layout that would have been little additional effort to add.
To participate in a competition, your Sim interacts with the Equestrian Center community lot, or with a Ranch Community board from Buy Mode, disappears for a few hours until you get a result screen. Meaning: the competitions function exactly the same regardless of discipline (Western Pleasure, Show Jumping, Endurance Racing and Barrel Racing), and the player has no impact on the result, which is generated based on your horse’s skills, impacted by its current mood and partly randomized on top.
A Sim with the Championship Rider Aspiration will have the occasional wish to participate in competitions, and have the goal to eventually place first, second or third in the Ultimate Horse Competition, for which a horse must first do well in Master level competitions in all four disciplines.
All of this too is, you guessed it, okay, I guess. But god how much more fun would it be if I had any impact on these competitions as a player, like the occasional strategic choice similar to what sims get for school and work sometimes. Or if there was any advantage to specializing a horse in one discipline or another or even if it took me a few generations of breeding for good horses until I could achieve that Ultimate Horse goal. Instead, I was able to win gold in the Ultimate competition with the horse I initially created – without giving it particularly advantageous traits by the way – and a dedicated Sim that spent most of her teenage time and some of her young adult life riding and training. And once that’s achieved, that’s pretty much it for concrete goals that the game gives you for your horse riding ambitions, unless you’re motivated to repeat the process with another horse.
The Sims 4: Horse Ranch of course lets you build your own ranch by placing everything from individual walls and floor tiles to horse beds, feeders and decorations. While I’m sure some people have managed to get good-looking results with even the vanilla options, my barns have stayed quite basic: I vastly prefer open barns where horses can move around and socialize, so I don’t build individual stalls. That’s a limitation in my own creativity though, I’m rarely one to brag with particularly interesting builds and bases in any game that allows this.
When it comes to actually useful objects to place in my stable, we’ve got a water trough, a hay rack, a straw square for a bed, and a ball that I’ve found to be completely non-functional in most of my playtime. And that’s about it for Horse Ranch’s interactive objects, the rest is decoration that’s only there for the aesthetics. Or perhaps aesthetic, singular, because the functional object come in exactly one style and color, even though water troughs and hay racks could so easily have been recolored in at least some different wood and metal optics.
I found myself getting increasingly salty while drafting this review, because the what’s there is fine I guess, but there could have been so much more theme is unavoidable in just about every aspect of the game.
So yes, this is a Ranch pack and isn’t going to include a ton of English style accessories, but why do I need to look to mods in order to add things like wall-mounted saddle holders, hay and straw bales in different sizes, feed sacks and barrels or hooks with halters or bridles on them? The game already includes horses pooping and getting dirty, so why can I not buy a wheelbarrow or a muckheap that my Sims dump manure into, why can I not buy a grooming kit that my sims then actually use? Where are usable hitching posts, a larger barrel training pattern, or some ground poles?
Why does everything about this pack feel like it’s just the bare minimum?
I can already see Sims community regulars answering that question with “Because EA and Maxis always rely on modders to finish their barebones products”, which seems to be a common opinion in the vocal community. I haven’t spent nearly enough time with other Sims 4 expansions to speak to the larger trend, and I obviously don’t have insight into the cost and revenue analysis of the Sims franchise and weather or not its creators could justify putting significantly more work time into these expansion packs. But putting on my Game Producer hat for a second here, I can make an informed guess that giving even a small team of 3D artists another two weeks of adding decorations would have already resulted in a vastly more meaty pack when it comes to decorative objects and CAS-customization, for example. And thanks to the active modding community of Sims 3: Pets, Maxis could have taken ample inspiration with regards to what players want, without even investing in equestrian research themselves.
All of this isn’t to say that I haven’t had my fun with this game. Steam says my total Sims 4 playtime amounts to over 50 hours by now – rookie numbers by Sims standards, I know – with the vast majority of that time having been put into the Horse Ranch expansion. Even with all the aforementioned limitations to the horsie gameplay, The Sims 4: Horse Ranch still has a decent chance of keeping you busy for as long or longer than similarly priced horse games such as Rival Stars Horse Racing, The Ranch of Rivershine or Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch.
The Sims has always been more about finding your own way to play and setting your own goals than it ever told you what to do. And yet, after winning that Ultimate Horse Competition and completing my Sim’s Equestrian motivation, I feel like I have no more concrete goals to work towards.
During my Sims 2 days – I must have had thousands of hours of playtime in that one, I did little else on my weekends for several years as a teenager – my main goal was to grow and expand the family tree and build a dynasty over who knows how many generations. I could do something similar in The Sims 4 – I believe the community would call that a Legacy Playstyle nowadays? Unfortunately, the way horse breeding and inheritance work in Horse Ranch puts a serious damper on any motivation for it: Horses can be encouraged to breed and have foals, which are very cute. Disappointingly though, the coat color of any baby horse will always be an exact copy of either its mother or its father, rather than combining the characteristics of both in an interesting way. Meaning, for example: if I pair a solid bay horse and a black tobiano horse, I will always get either a solid bay or a black tobiano, but never say, a bay tobiano or a different shade of bay.(And the Tobiano pattern will always be exactly the same)
Other characteristics such as body shape, mane and tail color or feathering are remixed when breeding, but that’s dubious comfort when coat color is by far the most visible quality of the animals. This simplicity of the inheritance logic is particularly dissatisfying to players of The Sims 3: Pets, where the animals had a more advanced layering system that made for a lot more possible combinations when breeding. There would be other ways to make breeding interesting in the long term, such as improved stats or traits across generations – there are some mechanics for babies to inherit favorable traits from their parents, but my foal’s ‘Champion Genes’ feel a bit pointless since there’s no further competitive goal to achieve after its father already won the Ultimate Horse Competition. Even the Legacy playstyle motivation of breeding for generations of horses is severely hindered by the fact that there’s no way to view your horses’ family tree without mods or cheats.
It’s not hard to imagine more ways in which The Sims 4: Horse Ranch could provide players with long term motivations: There could have been two or three Equestrian career options for example, that give your sims an option to make a living working with horses. The Community Jobs that you can access via the Ranch Community board scratch the surface of this idea by giving you the option to Guide a Trail Ride, Train a Neighbor’s Horse or Give Horse Riding Lessons for Kids, but these are one-off interactions rather than fully realized career paths.
The Champion Rider Aspiration is also quite simplistic and could easily have involved more tiers and more variety, such as goals to breed foals or to place in the Ultimate Horse Competition with several horses over the sim’s lifetime… And of course, splitting the sims’ Horse Riding skill into two or three equine related skills would have opened a lot more possibilities regarding careers, aspirations and interactions.
There isn’t even anything to really spend your hard-earned competition prize money on: expensive horse-related items are absent from Buy Mode, and since horses can be bought for 1000 Simoleons at most, splurging on expensive breeding stock isn’t an option either.
I mentioned above that I mainly want to judge the vanilla version of the expansion pack, but of course I have been having a look at some of the custom content that’s available. I definitely see myself installing some mods to enhance my experience, but I’m not quite satisfied with just concluding that “oh it’s fine, I can just fix the issues I have by using mods.”
For one, only some of the issues can be fixed by mods: yes, players create lots of additional customization options and build/buy items, but it can be hard to find content that’s stylistically coherent and doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb from the base game’s art style. (Side Note: the search term to use for mods that fit the base game aesthetic is “maxis match cc”). Additionally, aesthetic mods are vastly simpler to create and therefore much easier to find than anything that enhances the gameplay itself. I doubt we’ll see modders add coat color breeding complexity and additional skills or interactions, for example.
While scrolling through a few best-of lists for Sims 4: Horse Ranch Mods, I catch myself more getting annoyed at how many things required modder efforts to begin with, from halters to hay rack variations, from riding breeches to horse blankets.
I’ve written before about how much I love and admire the dedication with which equestrian modders shape games into horse-focused experiences. I love the creativity and passion I see in the Sims 4: Horse Ranch community. But damn I just really wish we’d gotten a bit more of those ‘must-have mods’ included in the actual game itself.
The Sims 4: Horse Ranch is a perfectly alright game experience. Considering that the Sims 4 base game is free, I don’t even find it egregiously expensive at about 40$, for how much play time you can get out of it. But the theme of “this is alright but it could have been so much better” is distinctly noticeable in every aspect of the game, from its character customization options to its build and buy objects to the gameplay and long term goals.
The Sims 4: Horse Ranch isn’t everything I hoped for, but it’s brought me enough fun both when I first played it last Summer as well as in the past few weeks that I don’t regret buying it or investing time into it.I’m even tempted to just get myself another Expansion Pack or two in order to flesh out my available gameplay a bit more – proof that EA’s business model of leaving players a bit wanting is working splendidly for them, I suppose.
It’s a damn shame that there isn’t more to Horse Ranch when it comes to equestrian gameplay and long-term motivation, and that some core features feel like downgrades compared to the horses in The Sims 3. But now that I’ve given the vanilla game its due, I might install some custom content after all and have another bunch of fun with it. Or perhaps I’ll put it away again for a year or two and then dive back in when I crave another fix – that’s been my usual experience with The Sims games in the past few years, admittedly.
Whether or not the Horse Ranch expansion is worth it for you will ultimately depend on your play style and motivations – which holds true for everything in the Sims franchise to a degree I suppose.
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Alice Ruppert
the sims 4, the sims 4 horse ranch, the sims, review, sims horses, ts4 horse ranch review
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