The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy review: glitz and glamour mask a lightweight pack

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy expansion pack presents a compelling premise: what if royals existed in the world of The Sims, and their status elevated them to the upper realms of society? It’s a pack about power and jealousy, and how your Sims navigate a world of high stakes, where a single foot wrong may cause a scandal, and the worst thing on earth is judgement by your peers.

The expansion pack does a fair job at immersing you in this drama, with new gameplay systems tailored to deep storytelling. But it demands a fair degree of player imagination, as the new dynasty system and the royal career are both relatively lightweight, providing a skeleton structure for scandal that you need to organise yourself.

Life as a royal in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy

As you begin your new life – you can set up a dynasty, then become royal by various methods – you’ll need to decide what sort of ruler you’ll become. Will you be loved or feared? This expansion pack presents relatively binary choices, with small interactions to determine what sort of impression you’ll leave.

Royalty is treated as a career in this pack. You can be part of a dynasty without being royal, and only parts of your Sims family can be royal, if you wish. You get paid a daily wage no matter what you do, but if you want to advance in the royal rankings, you’ll need to complete special tasks and improve various skills.

You’ll begin small. You can learn the sword-fighting skill, or charisma, or comedy. You can also go on a trip to your kingdom and say hello to your people. You can visit local schools to educate kids and show off.

It’s worth noting many of these elements are rabbit holes, so your Sims disappear, rather than actually visiting those local schools or kingdoms.

It does feel like a missed opportunity, in a pack filled with them.

The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy misses the opportunity to be a successor to Medieval

When the pack was first announced it seemed, akin to The Sims Medieval, that it would honour the legacy of that game with meaningful royal gameplay. That kingdoms and queendoms would be tangible, and you’d be able to visit grand castles and experience a high fantasy world.

You can create this for yourself, and I can see packs like Enchanted by Nature having great synergy with Royalty & Legacy, if you’re keen to set up an enchanted fairy kingdom, at least. But introducing royal lineage with Ondarion as the backdrop feels like a missed opportunity.

Ondarion is a modern-looking town, inspired by real-life locations. It’s very pretty, and the scenery is impressive, but it’s not extremely different from other locations in The Sims 4. Palaces, in modern form, are also far less impressive. If you want the towering, glittering castles that should naturally go alongside a royal-themed expansion, you’ll need to build them yourself.

I’m perplexed by the choice to focus on modern royalty, overall. If Britain’s real-life Royal Family has taught us anything, it’s only a lesson of irrelevance to modern society. They’re tack-ons from long ago, where being royal meant power and privilege.

In the same fashion, royalty feels tacked-on in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy. There’s not a whole lot for royals to do, and they hold little tangible power. Their status remains a fun distraction, and you can invest plenty of time in brewing family dramas and fights inspired by social pressure. But being able to create a line of royals is perhaps the least interesting part of this pack, when it should be the headliner.

Dynasties and power dynamics propel the pack

What’s more interesting in this pack, overall, beyond attempts to make modern royalty interesting, is the development of new family dynasties. Dynasties exist separately to royalty, and they denote a powerful family.

In Royalty & Legacy, famous Sim families now belong to established dynasties – the Capps, Montys, the Goths and so on. This classification allows them to form alliances or rivalries, with their higher place in society also leaving them as targets for rumours and scandals.

Each family dynasty is defined by set values, and complying with these values allows the entire dynasty to grow stronger and unlock perks (like nepotism, which speeds up career progression). When a Sim chooses to betray the family values, they’re at risk of becoming an Outcast, or of being thrown out of the family entirely, which is a neat twist on established dynamics.

There are higher stakes to behaviour with Royalty & Legacy, and that makes decisions feel more weighty, overall. For my own family dynasty, I chose to have one of my Sims be mean and jealous, and they eventually started a fight with their dynasty head (their father) which caused a major rift. He declared her an Outcast, and the family dynamic suffered. As a result, everyone in the family had less luck, and interactions failed more often.

You need to think about harmony as you play, with families conjoined by shared goals that encourage a togetherness – one that doesn’t necessarily exist in the base game. It helps to create your own stories, and to encourage natural Sim reactions as they live and exist within their new, more rigid dynamics.

New aesthetics, CAS options, and fun events make up the rest

Elsewhere in The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy, deficiencies in the royal mechanics are largely made up by other supporting elements. The fashions, accessories and hairstyles of Create-A-Sim in this pack are very impressive, with elaborate designs creating a sense of grandeur.

There’s nice curled and plaited hair styles, fancy crowns, ballgowns and cute dresses, and plenty of shiny jewels in new necklaces and earrings. Should you wish to pursue royal living, you’ll certainly look the part, and it’s nice to see other royals wandering through the local streets, dressed in their finery.

New build/buy items have the same benefits. You can create great, palatial spaces using new (and some older) items, building throne rooms and ballrooms that reflect your status.

Speaking of ballrooms, that’s another important and lush part of The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy. Perhaps inspired by Bridgerton, you can host a new special event in this pack: the Grand Ball. This is a timed event where Sims can get together in their best outfits – and masks, if you want to get even fancier – and have a lovely time drinking, dancing and networking together.

It’s the perfect backdrop for scandals, with whispered secrets often doing the rounds of ballrooms, and plenty of opportunity to break other Sims by sharing their deepest and darkest desires.

In one particular ballroom romp, I spilled a secret that Bella Goth was in love with another, and the scandal was immediate. In dialogue clouds, everyone started to talk, and the reaction to her was immediately negative.

Final verdict on The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy expansion pack

Beyond the desire to ruin the lives of other Sims, there are also other salvaging features in this expansion pack. There are a bunch of new magical events that can occur in Royalty & Legacy, including the pulling of the Sword in the Stone (Simcalibur), the arrival of Frog Princes (who can also reject you, and turn back into a frog), the mysteries of the Magic Mirror and more.

It’s worth wandering Ondarion to discover these, and to see all the nicer details around town – like rich sons racing yachts across Italian-inspired beaches, or the lushness of the game’s Ghana-inspired neighbourhood.

There is real beauty here if you take the time to look.

While some of my appreciation is clouded by my disappointment in what Royalty & Legacy could have been, rather than what it is, I can still see the care that’s gone into this pack’s overall design, and it does add plenty of neat, smaller features that make Sims life more meaningful.

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