Having been through the process of getting a home built, as well as spending countless hours back in the day playing multiple incarnations of the Sims franchise, when I saw Architect Life was coming to Switch I was pretty excited. There’s something very satisfying about working through the planning, design, and furnishing of a home, even if just in virtual form, and since that isn’t something I’ve bumped into yet on the eShop I was eager to check it out. Having now spent time with it though, there are absolutely some elements that open the door to some potential feelings of buyer’s remorse, depending on the player.

On the positive side, this is a pretty full-featured walk through pretty well all aspects of the planning and building process of getting a house constructed, though you could possibly argue it includes more than it needs. Assuming you’re working through the game’s Career mode, you’ll be working on a project basis, given a general budget, requirements for the size and different rooms to be included, and you’ll need to work to figure out how to deliver the best you can within those confines. Early on, this can lead to some very sad and extremely minimalist results, but since the client is in control, you’ll need to take care to stick to their plan. Where this gets to be a bit odd is when you’ll also get to choose between different companies who are bidding to do the work, then working through a variety of calamities during construction while trying to meet your schedule without going over budget. I suppose it could add some realism to the experience, but it also feels more like a novelty tacked on, since it has nothing to do with the creative process you just completed, and unnecessary. What most people will likely prefer will be to design and plan in a more unconstrained manner in the Free Mode, where budgets and even a sense of reality are no longer concerns… allowing you to roughly build whatever you like.

Outside of the somewhat odd temporary distraction of working with contractors, there are some other areas of concern as well. While I applaud the obvious work the developers did to try to make the controls as intuitive as they could, also providing on-screen guidance to try to be as helpful as possible, there are still issues. It’s obvious that this sort of title would be easier to manage using a mouse (a shame it couldn’t have been for Switch 2, perhaps the mouse control option would have been better), and while you can work through the game with a controller, getting to the right sub-screen to manage some specific element or setting can be cumbersome. What really chilled my enthusiasm for the experience though, was when it came to outfitting and furnishing the house I was creating. Simply put, there’s an embarrassing lack of variety in what you can choose from, and since there are multiple DLC packs on launch day waiting for you, this was by design. Even by the standards of the Sims franchise, notorious for nickel and diming its fans with DLC for pretty well everything, the scant number of appliances or elements to decorate the house you just sunk your time into designing, is stingy and unfortunate. 

My oldest daughter, who couldn’t wait to check this game out, immediately lost interest the moment she saw what little would be available to her to complete her designs. The thing is, by including more content out of the gate they easily could have attracted more fans, who would later likely be happy to have access to more, but by short-changing the base game and immediately pushing DLC they’ve risked either people passing it up, or instead being furious when they find out that what they’ve bought feels lacking. While it can be cumbersome to pull off designs that are admittedly more complicated, there’s no doubt that this game has ambition and gets some things right. But with as long as games like the Sims have been out there, and there being entire communities of modders who’ve created loads of different things for people to put in their houses, releasing something so sorely lacking in design content feels like a serious mistake for what would seem to be their target audience.