When The Sims 4: Horse Ranch launched, it finally delivered one of the community’s most requested features: horses. For players who enjoy building stables, creating dream horses, and living the ranch lifestyle, the expansion offers plenty to enjoy. However, while Horse Ranch succeeds as a life simulation with horses, it doesn’t quite deliver the depth many equestrian fans were hoping for.
The Good
The standout feature is undoubtedly horse creation. Players can customise their horses with dozens of breed templates, including coat colours, markings, personalities, and tack. This makes it easy to recreate real-life horses or invent entirely new ones. The coat painting tools are particularly impressive, allowing almost unlimited creativity for those willing to spend time perfecting every detail!
While the horse models are quite well sculpted and allow for some customization—like sizing of the chest, thickness of legs, bulginess of eyes, and ear length—they completely forgo height. This means no ponies, and your draft horses are the same hands as your Arabians (hands are a unit of measurement for horse height).
Building relationships with horses is a pleasant feature of the expansion. Riding skills improve over time, horses develop their own personalities, and training together unlocks new abilities and competition opportunities. Seeing horses socialise with one another and interact with their owners gives them plenty of charm, even if the available interactions are fairly limited.
A really nice detail is the difference in riding animation for a Sim that is new to riding compared to a competent rider. A Sim going out for a ride for the first time will bounce around in the saddle, their face set in an uncomfortable grimace. Even the horse will convey frustration at the unbalanced rider by kicking out occasionally. A Sim with a decent riding skill will sit properly in the saddle, looking happy and confident. More horse games should definitely do this if riding is a level-able skill!
That said, experienced horse lovers will quickly notice several missing features.
The Bad
Horses cannot be directly controlled. This means every action must be carried out through a Sim. This can be incredibly annoying when your horse is practically starving despite a full hay-net, but your Sim is busy sleeping or at work. Simple activities that feel essential in many horse games are noticeably absent, such as leading a horse, doing any discipline that isn’t barrels, jumping, trail riding, or being able to create a racetrack or jumping course (which you could do in Sims 3 Pets Pack). While riding is enjoyable, the overall interaction system can feel surprisingly shallow for an expansion centered entirely around horses.
Breeding is another area that completely falls flat. Foals can only be either the dam’s or the sire’s exact coat rather than inheriting colours and markings in interesting ways. There are no perks for purebred horses, no inheriting skill levels or genetics. Working with young horses to back them (i.e., get them used to the saddle and being ridden) is also absent. All of this makes long-term breeding programs far less rewarding than they could have been.
While foals can inherit traits from their parents, the formula is simple: one random trait from mum, one from dad, and one completely random. If either parent has the Champion Horse Trait, the foal may get the Champions Genes bonus, so at least that’s something. Overall, breeding isn’t something that is really worthwhile in gameplay or even for the fun of it, which is a great shame because horse gamers LOVE a good breeding system.
Competitions also feel like a missed opportunity. Rather than taking control during events, horses disappear into a competition-shaped rabbit hole and return with a results screen. Success depends on skill levels and a little luck, leaving players with very little involvement beyond preparing their horse beforehand. For a pack built around horses, more interactive competitions would have added significantly to the experience. Even The Sims 3 horse competitions had more depth. When you sent your horse and rider to compete, they could:
- Ride into the equestrian center together (which, no, you can’t do in Sims 4—they have to walk in separately).
- While the competition was running, you could choose between three different strategies: Steady Pace, Take Risks, or Go For Broke. This would impact how your pair performed and at least give you some way of participating.
Caring for horses can also become surprisingly demanding. Their needs decrease fairly quickly, especially when managing multiple horses, meaning most of each day is spent feeding, grooming, and keeping everyone happy. While this does reflect the commitment of horse ownership, it can become repetitive, particularly when trying to balance horses alongside a Sim’s everyday life.
The western-themed build items and Create-a-Sim clothing are excellent, making it easy to build authentic ranches complete with barns, paddocks, and country-inspired homes. Baby goats and sheep also add extra personality to any farm, helping create a lively ranch atmosphere beyond the horses themselves. You will notice a distinct lack of English riding decor, which has disappointed many horse people, as English is more popular than Western outside of the US. To create true English riding barns (or most other disciplines, for that matter) you’ll have to turn to CC and modding.
In Conclusion
Ultimately, The Sims 4: Horse Ranch is a charming expansion that captures the appeal of ranch life, but it stops short of becoming the definitive horse experience many equestrian players had hoped for. It offers beautiful horses, enjoyable riding mechanics, and plenty of creative freedom. Yet it lacks deeper systems such as realistic breeding genetics, horse leading, interactive competitions, and the ability to directly control horses. For Sims fans who love horses, it’s a no-brainer. For dedicated horse game enthusiasts, it remains a solid foundation that still feels like it could have offered so much more.
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