Home street is a free game on both the Google Play and Apple stores.
When I got this game, I thought it would be like the sims, where you can build your own house, decorate it, befriend other neighbors, work, and do many other things. While this is the sims in some aspects, other aspects are rather irritating.
In order to do anything, you either need “thoughts” or a combination of thoughts and materials from doing other things. For example, to grow vegetables it takes thoughts, and to make carrot cake, you need thoughts and vegetables. These things take real time to produce of course, or you can speed it up using gems. Thoughts can be generated for free as long as you have a thought to duplicate, for example I sacrifice 1 intelligence thought and in 1 minute I gain 2.
The part that gets annoying are the missions. Some missions require you to create a lot of items, or collect a lot of thoughts, or do jobs for neighbors that will give you money if you give them items. These missions seem to be really slow and demanding at times, as it takes quite a few minutes to collect all of the items that you need to fulfill the missions. In the Sims, things may take time, but you do not have to do those things in order for the game to progress. It is up to you whether or not to do these things, you can choose how you want to build your character and your world. This is what most of these mobile Sim-ish games forget.
Also, you can’t do anything with your character. You literally can’t even move them, they just run around pretending to do the jobs whereas you can have 10 jobs going at once and they just cycle around as the timer counts down. I can’t make my character talk or dance, or even sit on the couch. What’s the point of buying all the stuff for my house if my character can’t even interact with it?
Also, the neighbors can be real people. I thought “cool, maybe if we are on at the same time, we can chat!”. However, when you visit other people’s towns, they just run around doing their chores. All you can do is help them out with an activity by donating an emotion or something, and then move on. When you invite them over, its just their avatar that pops up, your avatars pretend to say hi, the avatars run around for a bit, they HAVE to stay for like 10-15 minutes, and then they go and give you an emote. No chatting, no interaction, and they aren’t even online when you go to your town or they come to yours. It’s just the game making the avatar run around. There is no real interaction with other players besides buying stuff from other people’s stores, almost like Hay Day or something.
Overall, this game was an alright home building game. However, if it wanted to be a city builder without interaction between players, I wish that they had a larger city where you could do more things. If it wanted to be a game like the sims where you have an avatar that you can decorate a house with and visit other players, I wish that it had more interacting with your avatar, and with other players. I will keep this game on my phone as it did help to pass time, and hopefully in future updates there will be more of these things.
Overall Rating: 2.5/5
If you want it to be more like The Sims, then just play the sims. It is not the sims. If they didn’t have completing tasks and all that then there would be nothing to do making the game pointless??? You can interact with other neighbors by joining neighborhoods. I think you rated the game low because you compared it to The Sims too much. It is NOT the sims. I get what you mean and a good honest review, but I personally like the game for what it is. If it was more like the sims than it would be called a copy/rip off. Some of the limitations bother me too, and I can agree…But when I want to play the sims I just play the sims. 😛
Nothing beats Sims on PC anyways. xD
You do make a good point. I guess I’m just really looking for a sims-like game on my phone. And I do play the sims on pc, I have all 4 versions of it!
Thanks, but I did enjoy this review and gave me a different perspective of the game. 🙂 Perhaps they could expand the game more, and who knows what will happen over time, Either way game is free so can’t complain too much. I am about to review the game myself. Haha.
I would love to find a phone game similar to the sims as well. I tried Sims Free Play a couple times now deleted it and reinstalled it. It takes too long for the sim or sims to complete actions and you cannot like do multiple tasks you have to wait for the sim to complete the task before clicking on the next. The times to complete taks also seem longer than the PC game. It’s terribly unrealistic imo, and a massive time killer in a bad way. Like Id have to devote my entire day to playing Sims Free play just to get a bit ahead. I hope that makes sense, but yeah I really dislike the phone game of The Sims. Not to mention the limitations in customizing your sim, house etc.
Yes the sims on PC are great. I had Sims 1 and 2 on PC, but donated them. I still have Sims 3 with just about all the expansion packs for PC. It is my favorite version to play. I didn’t buy Sims 4 for PC I waited and now I dunno I might buy it, but I really hate the world is no longer open to explore, more loading screens and I really HATE you can no longer customize your own objects with patterns etc. I bought Sims 4 for our Xbox One, thought something different try it on the big tv screen. Lol It looks and is very similiar to the PC game, in fact I don’t know the difference really besides the controls are very aggravating on the xbox. But I expected that before purchasing the game as a keyboard and mouse does not convert well to a xbox controller with limited buttons. I want to buy the Sims 4 for the PC when I have the extra money to splurge just to have it. 🙂 But personally I love the Sims 3 for PC, and besides the multitasking and emotions upgrade on the Sims 4 I wasn’t impressed at all.
I hated the Sims Freeplay for those exact same reasons. I tried playing the sims 3 and medieval on mobile when they had the old apps. It was alright, but some things were broken. For example, kids would never grow up. Then when the sims freeplay was created, they didn’t even try to fix the old paid version, but instead only focused on this new micro-transaction-ful version.
I bought the sims 1, 2, and 3 at goodwill or other thrift stores for less than 20 dollars. I also bought expansion packs at the same stores for less than 5 dollars. I bought the sims 4 at a thrift store, but my new PC doesn’t have a disk drive, so I had to buy origin access to get it again. With the origin access, I got the sims 3 with expansion packs and the sims 4 with an expansion pack…I think…and like 70 other games for a cheap price. I feel that it is rather hard to control the characters in the game, as half the time they don’t even do the tasks that I wanted them to do in the first place.
The thing that I was looking forward to was the creator of the free sims online, or freeso, reboot to port it to mobile. Everything was working and almost ready to go, but EA told the team to stop it, so now it is only available on PC. It would have had no microtransactions or anything, and probably would have been the best social game on mobile, but EA won’t allow it.
Yes sims free play is very frustrating and it’s too bad. I never knew you could get games from a thrift store, but that is a great way to purchase them. I never thought of it and need to keep it in mind when purchasing future games. 🙂 I have had trouble on and off with sims not because of no disk drive, but one example would be trying to figure out how to play offline now that everything connects to origin. I have a love/hate relationship with it now being all connected to origin and everyone just got looped into that choice. I dunno how to explain it I just remember Origin doing some mandatory update some time ago and everything with the sims was kinda different. I had to kinda google research myself out of the confusion. Lol. xD Basically I have Sims 3 and all expansion packs on discs, but it still is connected to origin. So without origin I cannot play the games I bought on hard disk. I also had to find a way to play it with origin being offline the first time I was without wifi away from home. EA is so frustating at times like you said stopping the reboot to port it to mobile and so on. If the sims wasn’t such a great game I’d probably have no use for EA as I have heard other complaints about most of their software and games. I am assuming EA is stopping it in fear of competition and probably something to do with money etc.