They all have something they do better than the others, and they all have big shortcomings.

Sims 2 is best for actually playing, letting Sims experience and do things and following the story. There’s so much depth there, and so much fun to be had. The downside is, the (unmodded) graphics are aging by now, and the customization is very limited.

Sims 3 is amazing for the sheer amount of choice you have in customization. Just about every color, every pattern can be fiddled with and customized until you’re happy with it. It looks pretty nice for its age, and has a cool open world thing going. But it is hard on PCs, especially with expansions. The game itself even warns you not to play with all the expansions if you have them all installed, and tries to give you the option to turn some off. The story progression is not as much fun as Sims 2.

Sims 4 looks and plays really nice, and sims have more ‘emotions’. The emotion thing was the big selling point. Sims’ genders are fully customizable. It is a lot of fun. But there’s still a lot missing compared to the last two games. It feels a lot more unfinished, the customization has been cut way down, unplayed families don’t really do anything in the background but move around, and the open world stuff is gone. However, stuff is still coming out for it, so a lot of these issues might be resolved in the future (probably apart from the open world thing).

Of course, all of these games have a ton of custom content you can find, and mods for fixing most of the problems I listed for the base games, especially 2 and 3. Sims 4 has a lot of cool stuff too though, but since it’s still ‘new’ sometimes you have trouble finding specific things. Honestly, I play all three at random times. Currently have come back to 4, was playing 2 before that, and 3 before that. There’s good and bad about them all, and they all are fun.