Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jan 3, 2022

  I'm honestly surprised people don't like this pack. Yes, the price is way to much, but this is sadly EA. First of all, lets talk about the non-magic stuff. I love the outfits and things to add to your house. The Wands and brooms are also pretty. I love the Q&A shelf. If you just want things to make your sims look better, you might actual want to get this pack. Now, the magic. Personalty, i wish there were more spells. However, i do enjoy the ones you have. Have an annyiong naboir? Set them on fire, or just daze them and make them leave the house. Or force them to clean the house. (this is really handy for me because i have a full house of cats with my main sim.) Don't want to brother with collectible searching? Copypasto's got you covered. Want to be a kleptomaniac sim without being one? They got that too. (And its even better then the trait.) Is your sim refusing to clean a puddle on the grass? Not anymore. The potions are also pretty good. I only use Prompt Resurrection, Plentiful Needs, And Rejuvenation. Due to my sim's trait of being a perfectionist, Plentiful Needs fulles all of them, and its pretty handy for letting me do other things. Rejuvenation replaces potion of Youth. Leveling up your rank can be a little girndy at times, but personalty, i feel like that's worth it. Its like how working on a skill is. And kept in mind, even with a maxed out spellcaster, it is possible for things to fail. If your not careful and use skills in moderation, you can die from overcharge. And even if you use Prompt Resurrection, you can still die again to this. And again. You can also have your pets as a familiar if you have Cats and Dogs. Even a ghost pet. Copypasto many seem a bit broken to some, but there's actually only a few things that this breaks that aren't all ready broken. Time caples and Limestone are the biggest ones, but not everyone likes chance games, and i feel that this isn't dirty. Its also really just these two. You could use Copypasto on something expensive, but to that i say: Have you tried gardening death followers? There are faster ways then Copypasto to make money. You can use Copypasto on things like rocks, but as far as i'm aware, this does nothing but raise your spellcaster charge. And using Copypasto a lot is a huge charge builder. Most of the "breaks" you could do also have other ways to get the results. Zipzap breaks an item, and you could repair to get parts... or you could just buy them. The only real issue i have (aside the price, but haha its EA), is how theres a lot they could have done, but didn't. Theirs a lack of content. That being said, i do enjoy what i got. And again, love the stuff for houses added in this.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 19, 2022

  For context, I sincerely enjoy The Sims 4, even as a fan of The Sims 3. All DLC I own was bought on sale, save for a few stuff packs. Realm of Magic is a bit of a mixed bag, admittedly. At the end of the day I recommend it, but only just barely. Compared to other packs, it comes up short. What saves it is the utility of the pack, the create-a-sim items, and build items. Overall I find the magic system a bit bland, the familiars a great idea but ultimately useless, buggy, and disappointing, and the progression is very ehhhhhhhhhhhh. Some of the features, such as duels, are also somewhat pointless and a bit difficult to set up. I also found it deeply disappointing that being able to use magic requires a specific life state. Not anyone can learn it, you have to choose an interaction and become a spellcaster. Then and only then can you use magic. I was hoping to combine this with vampirism to create a powerful vampire mage type of sim, but no such luck. One or the other. PROS: - New world, Glimmerbrook. Very pretty - New location, the Magic Realm, where you can find a sort of school where magic practicing sims spend their time. You can find NPCs that can make you spellcaster, stores that sell alchemy ingredients, familiars, and other items - Familiars, which are essentially tiny companions - Spells have LOTS of utility and genuinely affect gameplay, allowing you to teleport, instantly fill your hygiene bar, instantly creating high quality meals, fix broken objects, steal items, affect other sims emotions, resurrect a sim, and more. - TONS of create-a-sim items that have plenty of extra applications outside of spellcasters. Some easily blend in with gothic, punk, cottagecore, or posh vibes, be it clothes, hair, or makeup. High quality in that respect. - Spellcasting abilities are hereditary, and spellcaster children inherit bloodlines that affect their magical prowess. - Balanced gameplay. Use of magic builds up energy that can kill your sims if not vented or left alone for some time. Spells can also backfire and turn into curses that can be genuinely annoying, but are not difficult to get rid off. CONS: - Spells are not as interesting as they could be, and basically mostly exist to make things easier. - Familiars have very little utility, and mostly just flap around or float near you. No interactions with them outside of summoning or dismissing. Disappointing, as they could've had similar functions to a trained pet. - Magic Realm and Glimmerbrook as a whole are relatively small and hold few if any secrets. Glimmerbrook is especially underwhelming, as it has few lots and most are inhabited. - A bit buggy, especially where familiars are concerned. - Spellcaster is a life state, and in order to become one you must seek out a sage. This is not explained or tutorialized. Rather than magic just being another skill, you have to enter the life state. So you cannot have magic as a vampire outside of your vampire powers. This is limiting, though understandable for balancing. Just disappointing. Overall, I only just barely recommend Realm of Magic, and definitely only on sale. The quality and amount of content is just not there enough for it to justify $20.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 14, 2022

  Harry Potter comes to the Sims, without the Harry Potter license. Sounds great. But it is appallingly badly done, given the price. So yes, you travel to a special magic place (not technically a school, but you go there to learn), where you seek out a street that isn't called Diagon Alley but where you buy your wands and bits and bobs for doing your wizarding... but then you swiftly realise how pointless it all is. You can choose between lots of broomsticks, but they all do the same simple thing (let you move around the map faster), you can choose between lots of familiars but they have no interactions or interest (they all just tweak a skill-increase rate in exactly the same way), you can have magical duels (which visually exactly copy the Harry/Voldemort duel in the movies) but they are pointlessly random, you can collect potion ingredients but they all swiftly become unnecessary (once you have the Copypasto spell), you can choose between lots of wands but none of them do anything at all... etc. The game tells you that there are multiple types of magic and asks you which you'll learn, but the answer is that you'll learn all three of them, since learning spells is so stupidly simple that the game then has to throw a lot of grindy, repetitive interactions at you to slow down how fast you can learn the one magic skill/rank; and when you've learned the spells you'll wonder why you bothered, as most are pointless (except Copypasto, which is insanely overpowered and feels like a cheat). Imagine all the things they could have done with this! They could have had different skills (potions, defence against the dark arts, etc.) with challenges to upgrade them (like magical careers). They could have had separate supporting skills (like broomstick flying, or magical gardening). They could have had magic depend on other skills (so you'd want to level up other stuff to hone your sorcerer). They could have had different paths (ritual magic, practical magic, techno-magic, etc.). They could have had rivalries between Houses. And more.... Yet they actually did none of these. Zero. There was so much potential. But what they actually did was repetitive, unimaginative, and with no choice or variety. Having said that, the Magical Realm is beautiful, and if you want a bit of a Harry Potter homage in your Sims then sure, this is your way in. So if magic appeals to you then maybe buy this on sale. But really... what a wasted opportunity this pack is!
• gamedeal user

  Apr 15, 2022

  This pack is pretty disappointing to me - not because it's buggy or unhelpful, but because the whole thing was not thought out well. The first thing of note is that the magic system is horribly balanced. I can't stress that enough. The first spells you're likely to learn are some of the best ones on offer. The first Mischief spell you'll get is pointless (though most of the spells in that school are more for roleplay purposes than actual use), and pretty suitable for baby's first spell - making another sim sad is the kind of silly, inconsequential effect you'd expect as a tutorial, right? Well, the first Untamed spell lets you burn down somebody's house. The first Practical spells let you completely ignore Hygiene and the Repair skill. And the first potion recipe you'll get tops out all of your needs for the price of a single apple, which you can find growing wild in most neighborhoods. You get four of these for one apple. I'm not saying it was impossible before this to have a sim that could just fish all day, but it took over 30,000 lifetime aspiration points to do that. You can make a new spellcaster, move them into an empty lot with an apple tree and a cauldron, and they won't need anything else to exist. And it's not really uphill from there. There's some cool later-on spells, like teleportation or spawning food or immunity to aging, but most of the magic tree is clutter - potions that make negative interactions stronger, spells that give other sims bad moodlets, spells that tidy up a single plant in your garden. One master-level spell lets you teleport back to the Magic Realm, which is completely useless because spellcasters start out with an inventory item that already does that. And then you have a few more balance breakers, like duplicating items or bringing sims back to life (which is something you could already do, but the spell replaces a long writing aspiration journey or a top level cooking recipe with rare ingredients with a simple click of a button, and that's kind of the flavor of the whole pack.) You also get a free copy of a potion when you read its potion book, which gets downright silly when it comes to one-offs like the Potion of Immortality. You never actually need to hunt down ingredients - just learn the recipe and bam, you're immortal. Whenever one of my low-level spellcasters get cursed, I just get a spellcaster who hasn't already read the tome of Curse Cleansing to read it and pass my sim the free potion. I almost never have to actually brew potions, which... is supposed to be the reason potions aren't spells? I think? It doesn't seem like this is the way the game was meant to be played, but again - this pack just makes everything in it way too easy. The charge system is built up as a risk/reward, but it doesn't function well as either; the power increase doesn't affect most spells you'll actually use (you can't really improve instant effects like duplicating an object, teleporting, or object repair), and you more or less have to be deliberately trying to kill your sim to actually die from the risk factor. It almost never seems to actually kill you the first time you max out charge, firing a warning shot at you instead, it's hard to actually max charge without getting nonlethally blown up and reset to 0 in that 66-99% range, and if that wasn't easy enough, the progression tree immediately unlocks a perk that lets you drop your charge on will, allowing you to continue to cast as many spells as you want. Curses end up being scarier than death, and curses are just nuisances that you can't do anything about until you reach a certain spellcaster level, whereupon you can instantly get rid of them for free and they functionally stop existing. But they're at least something. This is all pretty slapdash compared to the Vampires dlc, which has a similar progression and level system, except the stuff you learn at first is weaker than the cool stuff you get later, the really strong and game-changing stuff is at the top of the tree, and the risks and penalties involved with the life state don't make it a no-brainer for every single sim you play. The Magic Realm itself looks incredible, but like the rest of the pack, it's very style over substance - a big, flashy space that has very little actual stuff to do in it. Duels sound cool until you realize it's just the same animation with no input or variance depending on what spells the sims know. Wands are completely aesthetic; brooms and familiars are only the barest step above that and have no interactive features. Learning magic boils down to a very brief fetch quest, then coming back every few hours and asking three NPCs for a spell and recipe until you eventually have them all. You might have to come back even more times to collect all wands and familiars, but they're all functionally interchangeable. (If you have Cats and Dogs, there's at least a level of interest in being able to bind an existing pet as a familiar, and they have slightly more functionality there.) And even though it's already been established that there's basically no need to ever obtain potion ingredients - even if there was, there's no trouble obtaining them either because they're all on sale at the Magic Realm too. Which is a shame, because the time you had to spend combing the world for rare collectibles tempered both the powerful effects and the moneymaking potential in Sims 3 version of magic - and speaking of which, the Magic Realm just lets you buy certain complex harvestables like dragonfruit and death flowers that will break any sense of progression for a new family, spellcaster or not. You can show up to Glimmerbrook, pay 1k for an item to plant, and then earn thousands a day and functional immortality without ever having to join a career or anything. It's just not very well thought-out, and the whole thing is a bit painful because you can really see a potential that wasn't carried through. The bones of something awesome are here, but only the art department put in any legwork. Which is... sadly kind of expected for the Sims 4. It's a great pack if you like playing with cheats but feel like hitting ctrl-c is too much effort. And it's alright if you just want to roleplay your sims as witches and wizards. But if you like game balance and having to work for your goodies, this probably isn't the pack for you.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 27, 2022

  It's just so boring, the first spell you learn in the pracitcal school replaces the need to shower completely and the first potion satiates all your needs. If you want to start low and get your sim to work their way up to get a nice life, it's done in 5 minutes as long as you have apples. The magical world is just so empty and the duels are neither engaging, nor balanced, it's just random with no user input. That's basically all this pack has to offer. I remember the magic expansion from The Sims 1 which was really awesome, changed the gameplay without breaking the game. It made you play around the mechanics, gave you a sweet world to explore and tons of things to do. You could breed your own dragon and it had a nice dueling system where you actually had user inputs.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 4, 2022

  DO NOT BUY THIS DLC!!!! Its totally broken. When i go to create a sim and do a spellcaster sim, it bugs out bad and all facial features are gone. Only thing that remains, are eyeballs, teeth, and hair. First one ive downloaded that is this broken.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 4, 2022

  [h1]Realm of Magic pros and cons.[/h1] Lets start with the cons, the world building in this game pack, much like most of the Sims 4 game packs, is mediocre at best. It's similar to all other locations but with a different skin applied, its the same kinda things you interact with and people you talk to. You pick up plants for potions, you study magic by reading and dueling or you can learn from chatting with other wizards and witches, just like you learn any other skill in the base game. I had kinda hoped they would have done it like in Harry Potter, where you could get invited to a school and attend an actual school for wizards, kinda like the university packs. Instead of just jumping into a portal and run around a mad house talking to strangers. Wands and brooms are also a thing in this pack, but they are kinda useless, there isnt really more to add to that, they are just visual props your simmer can flex with. There are a total 24 spells in this game pack, split across 3 schools of magic. Practical which has nine spells, Mischief got seven, and Untamed magic that has eight. There is also a total of 15 different potions which can be brewed, these are brewed in huge cauldrons, kinda like cooking. What I like about this pack is all the spells you can use in the "real world", like setting things on fire, cloning yourself, annoying and softcore torturing other summers around town, even force friendships and romance. Bloodlines are also kinda cool, the purer your blood, the stronger of a magic boost your character will have, so e.g. if both your simmers parents and grandparents are all wizards and witches, your character will have quite an advantage compared to someone with no magic in their bloodline. This pack like all the others, also comes with props, clothing and hairstyles. [h1]Spell's featured in this game pack:[/h1] [b]Practical Magic Spells[/b] [table] [tr] [th]Spell[/th] [th]Cast Rank[/th] [th]Description[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Repairio[/td] [td]Neophyte[/td] [td]Fix a broken object, or make crafted objects higher quality.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Scruberoo[/td] [td]Neophyte[/td] [td]Make something (or someone) squeaky clean.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Delicioso[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Create a tasty meal out of thin air.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Floralorial[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Keep your plants healthy and bug free.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Transportalate[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Move instantly to another location, regardless of distance.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Copypasto[/td] [td]Adept[/td] [td]Turn one small object into many.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Herbio[/td] [td]Master[/td] [td]Create a fully grown plant in even the most fallow of soils[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Homewardial[/td] [td]Master[/td] [td]Return to the Magic Realm[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Rite of Ascension[/td] [td]Virtuoso[/td] [td]Bestow the gift of magic to another Sim.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [b]Mischief Magic Spells[/b] [table] [tr] [th]Spell[/th] [th]Cast Rank[/th] [th]Description[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Despairio[/td] [td]Neophyte[/td] [td]Fill a Sim's mind with feelings of intense sadness.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Deliriate[/td] [td]Neophyte[/td] [td]Reach into a Sim's head and scramble their thoughts.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Furio[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Convince two Sims to argue and fight with one another.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Infatuate[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Convince two Sims to get romantic with each other.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Burgliate[/td] [td]Adept[/td] [td]Acquire something that doesn't belong to you.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Morphiate[/td] [td]Master[/td] [td]Transform a hapless Sim into an inanimate object.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Strangeify[/td] [td]Virtuoso[/td] [td]Make a Sim appear repulsive to everyone around them.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [b]Untamed Magic Spells[/b] [table] [tr] [th]Spell[/th] [th]Cast Rank[/th] [th]Description[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Inferniate[/td] [td]Neophyte[/td] [td]Instantly incinerate your target with the power of fire.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]ZipZap[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Harness electrical energy and give something a jolt.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Necrocall[/td] [td]Acolyte[/td] [td]Summon the dead from their final resting place.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Chillio[/td] [td]Adept[/td] [td]Create a blast of cold air that freezes anyone it touches.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Minionize[/td] [td]Adept[/td] [td]Control another Sim's mind and bend them to your will.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Dedeathify[/td] [td]Master[/td] [td]Restore a ghost to their original physical form[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Decursify[/td] [td]Master[/td] [td]Free yourself from the effects of a magical curse.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Duplicato[/td] [td]Virtuoso[/td] [td]Create a perfect replica of yourself, for a time.[/td] [/tr] [/table]
• gamedeal user

  Sep 14, 2022

  This dlc is like cheat mode. Literally. You become godlike in a matter of hours and no longer have to worry about anything, and I mean anything. including needs, moods, bills, talking, pooping. You don't even need to stay at your house, heck you don't even need a house. The repo man? Who cares! Just stand in front of the couldron at the magic realm forever and keep chugging those plentiful needs potions until you mastered everything, became immortal, have an infinite copy of every potion... You don't even need aspiration rewards. never weary, hardly hungry? Don't need it as long as you have that level 1 potion that you can make with 1 apple and get 4 -6 of them at once. But yeah its pretty fun. Also with the discount perk, you can buy items at -50% of the value in the magic realm then sell it in your inventory for a higher price, effectively giving you an infinite source of free income.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 5, 2023

  I, myself, am appreciating this DLC. I get my stuff on sale and this one was the most reasonable at the time, it seemed. I've created a magical sim and she's fun. For some reason, Sulani has a lot by a volcano that sims seem to love to trespass on. My magical sim was reading some magic books and didn't see the stranger sim just trot on in, drink 3 glasses of water and take a seat at my dining table there. Very strange that these sims do this. I decided to try to make them go away w/o greeting them bc .... who are they anyhow? So I casted the Spark spell. After the 3rd one, he got very upset and left. The town, it's sort of boring for it being a place of Magic. The clothes are okay. I'm really liking the furniture. It reminds me of the Disney Game's Furniture of wood and blue ♥ The price of this one isn't doubled up. I was happy to see that. Whatever discount I got on it, I found it worth it for what I expected and I'm happy with mine so far. Occasionally you'll see a NPC sim "flying" around. You'll know one is nearby because you'll hear them scream out as they lose control of their device. I'm glad I got this one :) I ALWAYS recommend sales with EA bc their prices are already too high.
• $n4ckB/\CK

  Sep 18, 2023

  Bought for 14 € in sale, but the amount of content is just a joke. Didn't believed the comments, but yeah totally overprized. Worth 5 bucks max. Better save your money and buy some real mage game...