inZOI review: "Currently feels like a soulless imitation of the worst parts of The Sims"

After spending time with inZOI this weekend, I can confidently say that it's a visually stunning and intricate world that ultimately feels devoid of any meaningful substance. Although not without major highlights, the world the Zoi's live in feels more dystopian than anything else, an empty consumerist life, no, existence, where the peak of your Zoi's aspiration is to sweep the floor.

First the positives. inZOI's character creation tool is something fans have been very excited about, and for good reason. Every item of clothing can be customized with your own textures, patterns and designs, and unrestricted color palettes come as standard. With so many points to be grabbed and changed, building a Zoi feels like sculpting a masterpiece. (As with almost any character creator, inZOI still struggles with plus-size bodies, and there are almost no concessions for disability aids – but the team have made it clear they are listening to feedback and new features will be implemented as a result.)

Once I'd spent the customary hour-and-a-half creating my Zoi, marveling at the potential for self-expression, I spent another couple of hours building and designing them a home. The controls felt alien but intuitive; like learning how to paint for the first time as someone guides your hand. Features that in games like The Sims are available through hacks or mods, are integrated beautifully into the interface, from creating your own meshes to toggling free-placing of items. Concepts like snap-roofing and adjusting walls still feel a little clumsy, but the bones of something bordering on design perfection are here already.

You can zoom out from your house and manage the city as a whole, too. You're able to control the 'Karma' of residents, the frequency of traffic, how clean the streets are, what kind of flowers bloom there. You're a town planner alongside your role as a Zoi-directing deity.

If you want to create things with unrivalled freedom, this game does it best, even now in Early Access. But the problem with inZOI is twofold. One, despite the director saying he doesn't see the game as a Sims rival, people will compare the two with good reason, which already sets the expectation. And two: in taking clear inspiration from The Sims, a series that has already been stripped of much of its original personality, inZOI misses the point of what makes these games fun. The Sims was once a tongue-in-cheek satire, full of quirks where absolute chaos reigned, and is now a sterile plaything laden with expansion packs and bloat. It's still fun, even as a pale imitation of its former self, yet inZOI has seemingly tried to replicate many of its weakest elements.

The Sims 4 is little more than an interior design program for me now. Build houses, decorate them, play the actual game for five minutes and get bored. That's the routine. And it concerns me that for all inZOI's incredible visuals and myriad unique design tools, it currently does little to entice players into the "playing with life" element.

Simulating but not stimulating

When the hours of building fun were over, it was time to give my Zois – a married couple – their first taste of life. The start of a happy family in this brave new world. Full of promise, I direct my Zoi to hug their husband, but she's instantly rebuffed. Even married Zois start off with an entirely neutral relationship, they barely know each other at all.

I try to speedrun intimacy with my husband, using a strange dialogue system that is largely devoid of warmth, and we accidentally become business partners. I give up on him for a bit and go to the park.

Traveling involves your Zoi taking the subway, a sweet detail which does make the city feel more real, but once she arrives at the park, the lifelessness of inZoi begins to bubble up again. A Zoi's rigid autonomy can be fairly disabling. She refuses to hold a meaningful conversation with anyone else. She won't use the easels to paint, just deleting it from her queue. She won't really do anything until I send her to take a selfie. She takes one, but there's no way to view it. Defeated, I send her home.

Five minutes after arriving, with her 'need' bars fully satiated, my Zoi keels over and dies. She'd been alive for a grand total of 4 in-game hours. The game doesn't tell me why she'd died, but gives me an option to "go back in time", which I gratefully take, only for her to die again and again. There's nothing I can do. Multiple hours of carefully curating the perfect characters and home, devastated in minutes.

I make new Zois and this time, they live long enough to find jobs – one an assistant professor and one a code developer. Unfortunately, the jobs are just rabbit holes, you sit and stare at the screen while they complete a full work day, and even bumping the speed up to max takes an eternity.

Once they get home you can eat, work out, or sleep. You can pick up a hobby, or make a baby, or meet someone new. There are options, but none of them feel particularly enticing. Your Zois soullessly meander around engaging in whatever action you've ordered with minimal personality or flair, and then stop. That's it. They also can't multitask and often get stuck in weird situations as a result. After visiting a restaurant my Zoi begin wandering the streets with about 10 other Zois all carrying plates of rotten food because they can't work out where to put them. It's quite eerie.

It's worth remembering that inZOI will only be launching in Steam Early Access and perhaps once it's been around as long as The Sims, we'll have a better overall game. It's not that inZOI is bad, but more that it promises so much and currently falls so short. With all the city management elements and lack of meaningful interaction between Zois, inZOI sometimes feels more like Cities Skylines with an avatar than a true life sim.

For all of its charms as a robust and creative design tool that allows you to build eerily realistic people and place them in idyllic homes, what Zois deem as "living" is demonstrably lacking in life. inZOI in its current state feels like a soulless imitation of the worst parts of The Sims, and no amount of custom patterned sweaters will fix that.