Paralives Positive Reviews Are Very Misleading…

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I really want us to have a serious conversation about this. As you probably know, Paralives launched in early access yesterday on Steam, and I’ve already spent around five to six hours with it. The moment I started playing, I realized the game has a huge amount of issues, and the early access price absolutely does not represent the current state of the game.

When the game launched, it had mostly positive reviews on Steam, and later it even climbed to very positive. But honestly, I think a majority of those positive reviews are extremely misleading. I understand the hype around the game and this desperate desire people have to finally find something outside of The Sims 4.

Believe me, I’ve played everything from The Sims 1 to The Sims 4 and inZOI, so I completely understand why people want an alternative. And yes, I know this is still an early access title that will continue to develop over time, but I personally don’t think it’s worth the amount of money it’s asking for right now.

What I really want to talk about are the reviews themselves. The majority of Steam reviews are basically people saying, “This game has so much potential, so let’s give it a positive review.” Everyone keeps repeating the same arguments: you’re buying the game for the price of a Sims 4 expansion, you’ll supposedly get years of free updates, there probably won’t be DLCs, and it’s made by a small team that deserves support. And while all of that may be true, why can’t people just give honest reviews? Tell me what’s actually wrong with the game. Tell me what’s genuinely good about it. Tell me what I should realistically expect.

Instead, most reviews say things like, “The game is super buggy, but it’s still amazing,” or “I’m having massive performance issues, but the foundation is incredible.” Then you look at negative reviews, and people are attacking them because the reviewer only played for three or four hours. But at the same time, there are tons of positive reviews from people with the exact same playtime giving glowing praise. That double standard is incredibly frustrating.

What the developers desperately need right now are people who genuinely criticize the game and explain what needs to improve. Blind positivity doesn’t help anyone. One review I saw literally said people should ignore negative comments because buyers “should have known what they were getting into” due to the early access label. I understand this is early access, and I expect imperfections, but there are early access games out there that cost less while offering a far more polished and complete experience.

Take Subnautica 2 as an example. Even unfinished, you can clearly see it’s still in development, but it already feels polished enough to enjoy for 10 to 15 hours with friends without constant technical issues. That’s the difference. We should be talking about games honestly instead of glorifying everything they currently offer just because they have potential.

And to be fair, Paralives does have genuinely good aspects. The Paramaker is fantastic and gives you a huge amount of freedom and customization. The building mode is probably one of the best parts of the game. You’re not heavily limited with placement, you can resize objects however you want, copying styles is easy, and you can create a massive variety of Paras.

The visual style is also very charming, even if it won’t appeal to everyone, and the town itself is surprisingly large with a lot of NPCs to meet. I also really like how they handled loading lots. Instead of the entire world being fully active at all times, you manually load areas when entering them, which is honestly a smart way to reduce lag.

The problem is that the performance is still terrible. Constant FPS drops, freezing, stuttering, random lag spikes, there’s always something interrupting the experience. And I’m sorry, but how can people confidently leave positive reviews while also admitting the game is borderline unplayable performance-wise? At first it’s not that obvious, but the longer you play, the worse it gets.

Another major issue is the life simulation itself, which feels extremely bare bones right now. Yes, you can create families, go to work, level up skills, flirt, socialize. all the standard life sim mechanics are technically there, but everything feels shallow. There are no meaningful consequences, relationships feel underdeveloped, personalities lack edge, and characters don’t really have distinct emotional depth. The systems exist, but they rarely evolve into anything interesting.

The social interactions become repetitive very quickly too. You constantly repeat the same conversations, the same jokes, the same flirt options, and eventually you already know exactly what every interaction wheel is going to contain before clicking it. I do like the RPG-inspired percentage system they implemented for interactions, but even that starts feeling repetitive after a while.

One thing that also stood out to me is how heavily the game leans into a very specific modern unisex aesthetic. When I created a masculine male character, most male NPCs still looked and moved in a fairly feminine way. Female characters still clearly read as feminine, but male characters often feel intentionally softened in posture, animations, and styling.

The unisex clothing options themselves are fine, but it feels strangely difficult to create rougher, older, or more traditionally masculine-looking characters. Even though the Paramaker technically offers a lot of customization, the town still ends up filled with very similar-looking Gen Z-style characters.

That lack of variety becomes noticeable after a while. You rarely see older-looking dads with messy beards, unfashionable people, or characters that feel visually distinct from the overall aesthetic direction the game is pushing. The animations are another weak point. They’re very slow, awkward at times, and often glitchy. Sure, it’s still better than standing around for ten in-game hours cooking a meal like in The Sims 4, but it still doesn’t feel polished.

Again, my biggest issue isn’t even the game itself – it’s the conversation around it. You cannot play a game for four hours, admit it has severe technical problems, call it overpriced, and still hand out overwhelmingly positive reviews purely because it “has potential.” Potential alone should not justify a €35 price tag.

And honestly, I think the developers knew exactly what was going to happen. They knew the hype train would carry the launch regardless of the game’s actual state because people are desperate for a serious Sims competitor. The game reportedly reached around 78,000 concurrent players and sold 250 thousand of copies, so financially it already succeeded massively. But after seven years of development, starting as a solo project before expanding into a team effort, this still feels underwhelming to me.

What frustrates me most is how difficult it has become to have honest conversations about games online. I constantly see people on Reddit saying negative reviews shouldn’t count if someone only played for a few hours, while simultaneously defending positive reviews written after the same amount of playtime. That doesn’t help consumers understand the actual condition of the game.

I’ve honestly started losing trust in influencer and journalist early access coverage because so much of it feels overly positive and afraid to criticize obvious issues. And then, whenever someone does leave a properly structured negative review, people immediately attack them for being “too harsh.”

You can absolutely enjoy Paralives. If you’re already having fun with it or prefer it over The Sims 4, that’s completely fine. But in its current state, I genuinely do not think this game is worth €35. It needs far more content, far more polish, and far better performance before it can justify that price. And it’s disappointing that we can’t seem to have more honest, serious conversations about that anymore.