House Flipper 2 PC Review

Simulation games are always important for people who tend to dive deep into a topic's core. Let it be racing, city building, or even as simple as house building. Even though they do not entirely mirror their real-life counterparts, simulators are good fun for people who just love the feeling of governing, completing, fixing, or giving out tasks. Some might say that simulators are just ripoffs and that people should go ahead and do the right thing, but I'd say it is not as easy as it sounds. Simulators give a great feeling because some people might be away from those possibilities, and making them real is the closest they could ever get.

One of those instances is real estate, where people can buy houses, renovate them, and sell them back to people who are in need of shelter. It is a simple way to earn a significant amount, but settling yourself into that mindset and finding an opening for a real estate position can be challenging. So, what is the next option to get into? Simulators, of course. In fact, in the past few years, one single renovation game on the PC market has dominated all the simulators out there, and it is House Flipper. The game's premise is as simple as it sounds; however, players must start with small to get to the bigger picture eventually.

 

House Flipper, on its own, actually provided a lot of content despite being a very simple game, thanks to its both story and sandbox mode. The sequel's existence actually made people wonder whether it was necessary to make the second game. Thankfully, the answer is right out there once you start playing, though I cannot say the improvement cannot be perceived well enough unless you never touched the first game, to begin with.

House Flipper 2 has you start as a basic, regular craftsman who apparently lives in a very messy house. Our protagonist has moved to this new house, yet he did not find the time or need to refurbish their own house is a bit odd, but hey, this is a nice in-game quest for you to fulfill. The first game also employed the same players who would live in a house in terrible condition, but as they kept profiting from their work, they would get to decorate their own houses.

One of the changes from the first game to the second, House Flipper 2, has a lot of talking and dialog choices since you are actually dealing with customers, not bots who disguise themselves as real people behind a mail. Although emails are still a thing, you get called by the house owner to learn about what to do and what not to do. To accept a certain job, you must first visit your inbox to learn about the jobs to take. The first few are about cleaning up houses, taking the trash out, or selling useless items.

As you keep building more and more experience cleaning houses, the game offers you the next new mechanic. Since the new mechanic's evenly paced introduction happens occasionally, you never feel bothered by the game about what to do when you are dropped onto the field of your work. The first few jobs are cleaning houses, taking out the trash, and so forth. Then, the game allows you to paint, replenish the surfaces with coating or wallpaper, demolish walls, and so on. Between these introductions, you get used to what to do when encountering a familiar situation.

 

When you start mastering the art of refurbishing houses, it's time to buy something to decorate for the house owners. Oddly, tenants give you what to get, and you buy them instead of them going around shopping, but hey, if it provides us with some profit, why not? Selling items is as easy as just holding a tool onto them and selling them away. Once the room is empty, you can start buying the things needed from the list and decorating. It is essential to keep the expenditures to a minimum as you want to keep the profit to the maximum for later projects.

The movement in House Flipper 2 is quite similar to the first game, and honestly, it plays well with mapped buttons for everything. The right mouse button is the inventory scroll, and you can change between the tools with one click of a button. While some games bind certain tools to numeric keys, the single radial menu for tools is still best suited for a simulator like House Keeper 2, and I am glad they kept it in from the first game.

The ease of access to tools also sets a nice way to find your objectives. By pressing Q with a selected tool, you can easily find which items customers want to sell or which color they want to see on their walls. Without going through the hassle of pages of the store, you can straight off buy the item needed. The first game didn't have this easy access, and you had to search the store mostly by typing what you needed.

The story mode offers quite a lot of content compared to the first game. Once you land on your home and look for jobs, you can find the map of the city you live in, divided into five parts. With different types of houses in each city, players can find themselves fixing a beach house or an apartment flat, which is a welcome change. The story flows slowly since the work you start to get into becomes more and more time-consuming, which can be a double-edged sword. House Flipper 2 is not boring, but stress starts creeping in once the game begins to feel a bit dragged.

 

If you are someone who never gets bored doing important work, then House Flipper 2 will give you hours of entertainment. There is no doubt about that. In fact, for a person who likes to be tidy in a virtual world, House Flipper 2 plays like a dream, as you can decorate your own house and people's houses and even flip the houses without setting a guide more on that flipping house's side later, as it plays a massive role in the progression of our character.

House Flipper 2 does not only stay with basic mechanics, but you can develop these skills further by doing them more and more. For example, the cleaning aspect of the game starts with just brushing the stains; however, if you keep cleaning stains for a while, you get to unlock a perk for cleaning. The first unlockable perk is being able to clean bigger surfaces, and the next one allows you to spray a cleaning product to clean it faster. Overall, perks help you finish a chore quicker and more efficiently. The best part is that the perks naturally unlock as you keep playing and gaining experience.

Some aspects of the House Flipper 2 feel very different from the first game, and one of them is the addition of calls from tenants. While you are minding your own business, you might get a call from the person who tasked you with the job and start explaining a few things, such as why they decided to get the room to split or not to touch anything in someone else's room. I am happy to say none of the voice lines include any sort of artificial intelligence mixed into it, which restored my faith, to be fair.

While talking, you can answer- or not answer- the employer's questions, but it is nice to chat with them as they can give different replies depending on your response to their conversations. It does not change the mood or the tasks, but it does not feel completely silenced, unlike the first game, where we didn't have much to speak about besides the emails we got, as I mentioned earlier.

 

The levels themselves are sometimes okay, but sometimes they feel quite strange. While the houses fit their environment, sometimes you can find rubbish rooms next to a completely clean room. I know those people want to decorate or repurpose the room, but at least they could have kept it clean. Not to fight with the logic of House Flipper 2, but it feels odd to see uneven rooms right next to each other.

Still, the game separates every room from well enough to understand what you have to do in a specific room. You can press the right mouse button again to check your objectives in a room by standing in a place. After cleaning, painting- or completing the given task for the room, the floating point in the middle disappears, telling you that you can move on to the next part of the house.

I think one of the reasons why developers decided to come up with a sequel was overhauling the graphics because they are gorgeous. Compared to the first game, which included a lot of flat textures, House Flipper 2 offers quite a wide variety of lively colors and dynamic graphics, which is quite up to today's standards. However, it is not all good and dandy, as the game can only offer you around three looping music tracks during your work.

Since the game gives you longer missions as you progress through the story, the background music becomes annoying to listen to. After some time, you might need to turn off the music altogether or have a radio or Spotify running in the background with fitting music- or not fitting music- the idea is you should not be listening to the same tracks repeatedly.

 

However, there are some differences compared to the first game, which caught me off-guard. These changes are not massive by any chance, which would definitely change how you approach your missions. Painting, one of the most used mechanics of the game, is now a grid system instead of a row system. You can choose the exact space to paint your walls or ceilings and upgrade the brush to paint three squares simultaneously.

The flipping side of the game got a bit better with chosen candidates being more lenient towards their likings and picking exactly what's good or wrong with the house you have been working on. The profit of your work seems to have increased a lot, too, and you won't find yourself struggling with money unless you are focusing too much on flipping residents.

House Flipper 2 lets you beg the question of whether it's worthy of getting since the title is the continuation of the popular series. The answer could be answered in both ways as some people might stick to the first game as it is more established and considered the staple of house renovation sims. House Flipper 2 does not bring much to the table besides a more rooted story to go along with the same sandbox feeling. People are allowed to do what they like unless that is selling random items in your client's house because, for some reason, this was allowed in the first game.

 

House Flipper 2 clearly defines "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The gameplay does not differentiate itself from the first game, yet people will find it more appealing as it uses the same formula as the first game. House Flipper 2 tends to be a facelift of the series' debut title, fancier graphics, and more up-to-date mechanics, and combined with a classic playstyle, it is still worth getting. But hey, if you are still having fun with the first game, that is acceptable; you are not missing much by getting House Flipper 2 late, but it would be nice to get it after you finish your adventures in the original game.

Atilla Turan (@burningarrow)
Editor, NoobFeed