REVIEW / Electrician Simulator (PS4)

What is it with Sims choosing the weirdest subjects to focus on? I mean, I want to command a space station, and I’m generally less bothered about power washing my garden. If I want to do that I’ll go and indulge in real life, something that I try to avoid at all costs. Saying this … we did get to be a goat, so there’s that. The Sim we’ll be looking at today will see us entering the role of an Electrician. It’s certainly less safe than the power washer but is it going to be getting the old blood pumping? Probably not but we’ll see where we go with Electrician Simulator, the PS4 game on the board for today’s discussion.

Importantly, I don’t have any problems with the concept of Electrician Simulator. You take the role of an electrician starting out on a new venture. You then move from job to job completing tasks such as changing bulbs and rewiring plugs and sockets, and these tasks obviously become more complicated as you go. As this is a simulator it would be a bit remiss of me to say that I didn’t enjoy the game because all you do is play an electrician and fix things. The concept and gameplay are basically what it says on the tin and that’s completely expected and fine. It’s how you go about performing these tasks. that’s frustrating at times.

Electrician Simulator is not a game that feels even the slightest bit intuitive. This is my first and biggest problem with this title. I spent more time hunting around the screen for clues on what buttons needed pressing than I did while playing the game. So, as an example one of the first missions involves repairing a game controller. Having spent ages taking apart and reassembling the damn thing I finally got it repaired only to not be able to complete the mission. What I would have loved was a dialogue box saying, “You’re done, press x to send to the customer,” even better, just a mission completed screen and a reward. What I didn’t see was a box in the top right corner of the screen with a button that I had to push to send it off. These aren’t things we naturally look for and I spent 10 minutes of my time staring at the screen and trying different things before I spotted it. These are ten minutes I could have spent doing something constructive. This isn’t an isolated incident. This is the norm and it’s really frustrating when all you want to do is play.

On top of the niggle I’ve just mentioned are the controls. This is a game that feels like it’s been ported from PC and not optimized very well for a controller. Instead of a mouse, we have a cursor that’s moved about with the thumb pads. You need to click directly on an item to bring up its command wheel and work on it. This isn’t as simple as this though. You might have a plug in a socket and want to remove it so you can fix it. You need to be highlighting the plug and not the socket it’s in, and this feels a bit fiddly because the thumb pads will never be as accurate as a mouse click. There’s a lot of unnecessary miss-clicking of things which just slows everything down. The same applies when you’re actually fixing items, it’s too easy to click the wrong thing and this makes what should be an enjoyable task a chore. The camera isn’t always great either. In a nutshell, it often feels like everything is taking longer than it should and this is immersion-breaking.

Your jobs are roughly broken into two types. You have the sort where you need to go out to the customer’s house as I’ve just mentioned. You also have workbench jobs where you’re sent an item that’s broken and have to fix it and send it back. These are a fun change from the norm but the awkward control issues carry over and are coupled with a UI that can be a bit unclear at times. This means that the same problem of tasks being time-consuming for the wrong reasons carries over too. I spent more time hitting the wrong buttons and going around in circles than I did fixing stuff, which is sort of the point.

My last gripe is that the tutorials aren’t as instructive as they could be. You’re told to rewire a plug but you aren’t told what order the wires are supposed to go in, so it’s trial and error. This isn’t much of an issue on its own, but you have to turn the electricity off at the mains before starting the task, then turn it back on and test the appliance. If it’s not working you have to go back to the mains, take the plug apart again and rinse, and repeat. This means performing about six extra steps to just test something that isn’t working and with the awkward controls it feels like it takes forever to complete a task that, though not simple, shouldn’t take an age either. I understand this is a Sim and they want it to be as realistic as possible but tasks shouldn’t feel aggravating and they start feeling tedious quite quickly.

I have one little note about the missions in Electrician Simulator. This is a small thing but when you’ve completed a task you don’t get a “thank you,” from the customer or any differing story text. You get the original mission text repeated and are given a score and money for your time. I’d have liked to have seen some text that fitted task completion, and while this isn’t a big deal in gameplay terms it feels a little bit lazy when this is a game that’s trying to be true to reality. If you met back up with a customer and they just repeated what they wanted you to do and paid you, you’d think there was something wrong with them.

All in all the concept of Electrician Simulator isn’t bad and in short doses, this is an enjoyable game to play about in. The graphics are fine for the title and the music is relaxing. You have all the time in the world to complete your jobs so there’s no problem there either. It’s the wonky control system that makes things feel unnecessarily frustrating and I think this is going to prevent play for longer periods. If you enjoy Sims this might be fun for a while but absolutely don’t expect miracles.