In November 2023, during G-STAR (the biggest JV event in South Korea), KRAFTON, the publisher of the games PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), announced inZoi. A radical change of register since it was a management and life simulation game. In other words, a Sims-Like.
Very quickly, the first images and the first promises were so crazy, that for many players and fans, the "Sims-Like" quickly transformed into "Sims-Killer". Especially with the cancellation of The Sims 5.
As the months went by, the good news and announcements were so crazy that many began to fear yet another "scam" in the video game industry with a game that would never be released or that would arrive in a deplorable state, light years away from what we had been sold.
While the game's early access will start on March 28th (at 1 a.m. in France), we were able to test the game a week before its release to get our first impression. Here's our full verdict.
TEST CONDITIONS
- Tested on the Early Access version provided by the publisher
- More than 20 hours of gaming on PC (Intel Core i9, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3070)
- Fully tested in high and/or ultra configuration
Welcome to AR Company, meow
Unlike The Sims, inZoi offers a lore and a story. The game's name comes from the Greek roots "Zoi" (meaning life) and "in" (meaning "into" in English). InZoi is therefore "into life." And this little detail is quite important. Because, in the game, you play your own role, behind your PC.
You join the AR Company team, which offers you the chance to take control of a city to lead Zois, the inhabitants of that same city. Thus, unlike The Sims, you will not control a character to "play with life", but you will be a sort of game master who will control an entire city to "build stories". You are a bit like the "Michael" in the series The Good Place for those who know the reference (watch the series, it's really cool).
You are not God, however, and although you will have great control over the game, you will not be able to control everything. After all, you remain an employee and a creator of the company. Small detail, your boss is Mr. Psycat. A cat.
Because yes, let's not forget that inZoi is a Korean game. So, you'll have to get used to the whole "Kawai" part of the title with a rather "uwu" artistic direction (which can sometimes be quite uncomfortable for some Zois). All the game's advice will be given by Mr. Psycat, who speaks to you in cat language, with "meow" and "purr" all over the place.
Create your Zoi
Although you are basically a member of the AR Company, you will of course create your Zoi to control and create it. involve in your future stories. Because after all, the game is still a life simulation. And on top of that, character creation is ultra-detailed and very advanced. You can already download the "Live Link Face" application (only on iOS for the moment). This application allows you to scan your face in real time so that you can have a Zoi that looks exactly like you... Well, almost.
While the app is pretty cool, there's still a lot of room for improvement. It's still in beta and should be refined in the coming weeks and months with an Android launch. The game lets you name your Zoi, choose your age (from child to elderly), choose your identity with a male or female gender, or even enter your own gender, allowing everyone to create the character that best suits them. Next, you must choose your Zoi's personality trait.
You have a total of 18 choices. Unlike Sims, you won't choose your personality traits manually. inZoi offers you predefined traits that assign values and characteristics to your Zoi, which will guide their life and actions. Of course, once in the game, you will have control over your Zoi and it will be possible to change certain character traits.
For example, a Zoi who tends not to be very romantic will not perform romantic actions on his own. On the other hand, when you control him, if you multiply romantic actions, your Zoi may become romantic over time. You should know that free will is very important in the game and that if you do not control your Zoi for 30 seconds, the latter lives its own life. Fortunately, you can enable or disable free will with a single click in the game.
Finally, before moving on to the "physical" part of your Zoi, you must choose the life your character wants to live. This is a bit like a "long-term wish" for a Sim. You have about ten different choices, with "a life of transformation" being the basic choice, allowing you to have no real goal and live your life by feeling. The other options will be more oriented towards different destinies. Some will be more intended for a particular type of Zoi with more favorable character traits. You will therefore have to choose carefully, to be sure to put all the chances on your side to live a good life.
Once you have finished configuring your Zoi on the "long-term wish" part, you will be able to create the physique of your avatar. You will be able to customize each part of your character's body (in addition to the Link Face application). The creation part is quite detailed and advanced, and fans of creation will be delighted and will be able to spend several hours there to create their perfect Zoi. Then, it's time to dress your character. On this point, we can really feel the "Early Access" side. You have few clothes, the choices are quite limited.
Fortunately, it is possible to import your own textures to have unique outfits and clothes. This allows you to multiply the possibilities and vary your choices. inZoi also offers the use of generative AI to generate textures. For the moment, this option is not yet very developed. However, some players manage to create some pretty crazy creations.
With the integration of the Canva catalog, it becomes very easy to download and import clothes, Zois, and textures into your game. Example here with a model of Jinx (Arcane / League of Legends) or even the actress Emma Watson who are incredibly well reproduced and accessible for free to be integrated into your game in two clicks.
Start building your stories
Once your Zoi (or family of Zois) is ready, you have to get started. You have the choice between two cities: Bliss Bay, a city largely inspired by California, and Los Angeles with its American side, its small blocks, its sunny and warm climate, its funfair, and its seaside resort atmosphere. The second city is Dowon, which is inspired by an urban area in Korea with quite a few buildings and a more temperate climate conducive to the four seasons. Starting in August, with the first DLC, it will be possible to discover the city of Kucingku, a city inspired by Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
inZoi offers an open world, in which Zois can come and go and in which you can also move around: on foot, by bus, subway, or by car. The open world of inZoi is quite lively, even if we could expect more. The game is quite realistic, with cities that are more active at certain times of the day.
There are quite a few Zois in the meeting places (parks, shops, etc.), but the streets are quite deserted. The cities are medium-sized; they're not gigantic, but they're not tiny either. Especially if you want to get around on foot. The locations are quite diverse, even if, for the moment, not all are accessible and the locations in the city are quite limited.
On the other hand, there's a really nice atmosphere. Each location has a unique character, where you can feel that a certain attention to detail has been paid. There are plenty of things to do in the available locations, with quite a few Zois that allow for numerous interactions.
Of course, the adventure will begin in your first house. You will have the choice between two or three options on the map, with furnished houses or bare lots to build your first home with the little money you have to start your new life.
The perfect opportunity to discover the first gameplay mechanics. Overall, there is nothing very complicated and playing inZoi is not very different from The Sims or other management games. The game interface displays the time, weather and day, with the possibility of playing in accelerated mode (up to x10) to speed up certain tasks (like sleeping time).
You have eighteen small white dots that correspond to the different emotional states of your Zoi. This tells you if the latter is focused, uncomfortable, upset, etc. These are the short/medium term moods of your Zoi that will depend on its activities and interactions with other Zois.
Just above, we have needs, with hunger, hygiene, sleep, toilets, good nature, sociability, recognition and energy. Of course, these needs will affect your Zoi's mood and if you don't respect them, they can, in the long term, harm the health and life of your avatar and lead to its death. Because yes, in inZoi, a lack of recognition can lead your Zoi to depression and even death.
Of course, the one and only goal of games like inZoi is to lead your quiet little town by making friends, finding love, doing your dream job, earning money to live the high life, whether it's Whether alone, in a large family, or with many friends. All of this will necessarily depend on your "long-term wish". So, you need to meet people, whether at home, at work, or in public places. Building relationships, again, is quite similar to various management games.
You can choose between several conversation categories. Throughout the exchanges, you will be able to progress the three different affection gauges: love, professional relationship, and friendship. Here again, we feel that we are in early access and the choices are not very numerous and it quickly goes round in circles. In only ten or fifteen minutes, it is possible to go from an unknown relationship to a great love with almost any Zoi, regardless of whether you are already in another relationship.
In addition to social relationships, you will be able (and you will have to) work to earn a living and launch a career. In total, you have about fifteen jobs available in inZoi. However, only five or six jobs are actually available.
For example, in the city of Bliss Bay, you can be a reporter. But this job isn't really accessible, so every morning, your Zoi will leave for work and return at the end of the day, just like in The Sims. The inZoi Studio team has promised, however, that jobs will be available with the ability to follow your Zoi and work throughout the day, without DLC.
This is indeed the case, but not with all jobs. In the town of Bliss Bay, you can be an employee of a surf shop, where all day long we have to perform tasks, such as restocking stocks, reorganizing shelves, cleaning the shop, or simply working the cash register. In the town of Dowon, you can be a firefighter. The first few days, however, won't be very exciting and will mainly require you to perform administrative tasks, since you start your career at the bottom of the ladder.
Again, overall, the gameplay is quite limited and repetitive. Although it's very interesting to have these kinds of possibilities, we feel, once again, that we are in an early access phase. It's still promising for the coming months and the new content to come.
Of course, you'll have to be careful of your karma. Because yes, in inZoi, your choices have consequences. If you commit malicious actions, you will incur bad karma that may play tricks on you when your Zoi has finished his adventure on this Earth.
Conversely, showing kindness will help you earn good karma. For the moment, it doesn't seem that this feature is really well developed in the game. For example, stringing together conquests and not being very honest, as long as you are not married, doesn't seem to have any impact. The only ways to lose karma seem to be bad behavior related to anger or when you show disrespect towards other Zois.
In any case, the inhabitants of Bliss Bay don't seem to be very good people. Thanks to the karma table, you can access the "Karma Status" to get an overview of the town's inhabitants. Of the 200 residents, more than 160 have "slightly bad" karma, compared to only about ten with positive karma. Twenty even have very bad karma.
© Le Journal du Geek Another rather nice feature is the schedule. Each week, you have an update of your schedule that allows you to see your work days and times, but also the different events that will take place in the city.
And if this doesn't suit your schedule? You can always move the days and times of events. This program also allows you to have an overview of your "Zoi map" with a summary of your avatar's life: identity card, desired life, character traits, values, etc.
Manage the city as you wish
The great strength of inZoi is the ability to customize many aspects of the gameplay and the city. By default, everything is set to "medium", but you can fine-tune every aspect of the city with relationships, karma, incident count, health rate, population, and much more.
With this, you can create a nearly abandoned city by setting the slider to "lowest", or conversely, create a large, dynamic megalopolis with the "highest" slider. In total, you will have the choice between eleven possibilities: the weakest, very weak, weak, slightly weak (x2), medium, slightly high (x2), high, very high, and the highest.
In addition to what is happening in your city, you will be able to manage the entire visual part and change the plants, trees and even the cleanliness of the city, allowing you to give a post-apocalyptic feel to your game. It will even be possible to change the weather.
Although the climate change will have no impact and will only be visual, since the game offers a season system which, for its part, will actually progress as the game progresses. But, it will be possible, for a few hours, to make it snow, even in Bliss Bay, the Californian town which is not conducive to this kind of thing.
Graphically and technically not yet flawless
Once settled into the city and our first few hours in hand, we begin to discover the real workings of inZoi, and we realize that we are indeed in early access and that there is still a lot to do to make the game very complete and stable.
First of all, besides the rather limited and redundant side, we realize that the game is not technically perfect. There are quite a few slowdowns, quite a few bugs, with certain actions that cannot be performed by Zois or that do not launch.
The reactions of the Zois are often absurd. For example, it's not uncommon for a Zoi to run off in the middle of a conversation and sit down at the other end of the room where you are. Only to return to continue the conversation a few seconds later as if nothing had happened.
Other actions (like driving) are far from perfect, with gameplay that is very laborious and quite buggy. For the moment, it is recommended to keep automatic driving.
Graphically, the game is very beautiful and the Unreal Engine 5 keeps its promises. At least, if you play on ultra or high settings. The game is quite limited graphically on medium settings and rather ugly on low settings, with, on top of that, still bugs and slowdowns.
So of course, all this is likely to improve over time, because the inZoi Studio team has already promised four major free updates that will arrive in May, August, October and December that will improve the game, fix bugs, implement community feedback, while adding new content. A first DLC, free, is also planned for August. But for the moment, for its launch, inZoi remains quite unstable and can even lead to some crashes.
Although the game offers quite a lot to do, the possibilities remain limited. You can build relationships, build a family, have kids, get married, but it's all "on the surface" and not explored in depth enough.
So, yes, it's quite promising and encouraging for a launch, but it's still quite light, especially compared to the ogre of The Sims 4, which has 10 years of content.
Although it's important to remember that the two games remain quite different, The Sims remains a simulation game with an arcade feel and a far cry from reality, where anything is possible. Like in a child's imagination, you can do many things, more or less realistic. After all, who can boast of having escaped death by negotiating with the grim reaper?
In inZoi, we're in a life simulation that's not at all arcade-like and aims for seriousness and ultra-realism. Although the game may appeal to fans of The Sims, we are looking at two very different propositions. But, for the moment, it still lacks content and possibilities for the ambitions promised by the game.
The construction mode could be improved and is still limited
The construction system is also far from perfect. Besides the limited aspect, again, compared to The Sims, we feel that it lacks practice and is not intuitive. In short, some actions are quite complex and not practical enough. It lacks optimization and logic. Actions that could be performed in two clicks require going through sub-options. It takes time to adapt and it is not always logical. Here again, The Sims are years ahead and we feel how much this can affect the interface and gameplay. We still have enough choices and possibilities to create very beautiful houses with several rooms and an outdoor environment. On the other hand, for swimming pools, you will have to wait for the update coming in August.
After building your house, you will be able to furnish it. Here again, in this part, you are quite limited and there is a serious lack of content. On the other hand, you can still do quite a lot of things and it is possible to furnish your home well with quite a few options for the placement of objects.
Once again and as is often the case with inZoi, we feel the great potential to come in the coming months and years, but for the moment, the creation and furnishing part remains, it is still too limited.
inZoi will be available from March 28, 2025 in early access at 40 euros on PC. This early access should last at least a year, with already four big updates and a DLC (free) expected for this first year. The game should arrive, later in final version, on PC and consoles, with a lot of follow-up allowing for numerous updates and DLC over the years.
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