The Sims 4 lets you decide your Sims' entire personalities and download mods in-game

Work out with Chuck Norris and fish with an astronaut

Ever wanted to invite Barack Obama bartend at your house party? Face off against luchadores in a chess game? Maybe go stargazing with Fidel Castro? If you answered yes to any of these questions...then you've probably already done all of that in The Sims before, but The Sims 4 (opens in new tab) has a pretty good twist on EA's formula. Now you can adjust your Sims' personalities to your heart's content, making it much easier to replicate those real-life counterparts, and get your hands on cool mods the easy way by downloading them from within the game itself.

The Sims 4 allows for a level of customizability that even this series hasn't yet seen. You can adjust your Sims' physical features as always, with even more options and tactile manipulation to adjust your Sims down to arm thickness and eyebrow arch. What The Sims 4 really brings to the table though is personality, allowing you to customize your Sims' swagger, values and ultimate life goals, combined together to make your Simdom more organic and alive than ever before. This also brings in your Sims' emotions into play, allowing them to improve certain skills faster depending on what mood they're in, giving the whole affair a lite strategic feel too.

The game also incorporates a new creation called the Gallery, an in-game shop of gamer-generated mods that you can purchase with Sim currency and load up in seconds. Anything from people to rooms to entire houses can be pulled from the Gallery (or put in by you), streamlining access to user-created content. Now you have more control over your Sims than ever before, but it's when you let them go and see what crazy stuff they'll do that things really get interesting.

Check out the following slides for screenshots and more info.

You can adjust your Sim's features directly, changing the shape of their nose or the width of their shoulders with a simple grab-and-drag

You can choose your Sim's greatest aspiration--attain knowledge, find love, be popular--which sets the base for their personality and gives them coinciding "talent" boosts

Next you can pick three main traits for your Sim, like snobbishness or valuing family, which changes their behavior and who they interact with best

Your Sim's traits determine what they're best at, and situations where they excel

Like something your friend made, or want to share something of your own? Upload your creations to the gallery, and download cool stuff made by others

Other aspects of the game, like build mode, have been streamlined too

And your Sims will keep doing silly and weird things if you give them the chance