This is my review of House Flipper 2 in just Four Minutes

There's a certain amount of jank that feels almost inherent to simulator games – it becomes part of the aesthetic. The first House Flipper game epitomized this for me. I came across it late at night on a Game Pass or PS Plus and, despite noticing the slow pace, awkward controls, and glitches, I lost the rest of the night to it.

This felt like the perfect way to play it because I had next to no expectations and spent no money on it. House Flipper 2 is brave to follow this up because anyone who has played the first knows what they like and what it needs to do to justify retreading this ground. For the most part, it does.

House Flipper 2, as the name implies, is all about flipping houses. It tasks you with bringing your handy dandy tools into someone else's house to clean up their messes or start on a renovation they have put off. You initially start out just clearing out a room, or painting a wall, only for everything to get more complex as you are customizing wiring, changing house plans, and eventually, fixing up an entire house.

Like the first game, it has a quite clever start, throwing you into the messy environment that is your office, without the tools needed to clean it up. Low on funds, you check your emails and find a few clients willing to pay you to fix up their house. House Flipper 2 is all about learning on the job, and there are a good few to get you going. Split out over three main areas, job emails have a rough pitch, which you then accept and start.

Taking its roots from internet satisfying videos, houses are often left increasingly messy, where you must meticulously clean and fix them, only to make a tidy profit. House Flipper 2 is very similar to the first game conceptually but much more impressive, with new mechanics, cleaner graphics, and full-on voice acting, even if voices aren't always the best quality.

Animations are smoother and dirt makes more sense. It plays well into the environmental storytelling inherent to a big mess and has a bit of humour with it all. As well as adding mechanics, it does away with some of the more tedious elements of the first game, removing installations, and replacing them with 'Assemble Mode'. This has you build things like Bathtubs and drawers IKEA style, which then gives you a discount buying them wholesale

The Assemble Mode does make me glad they aren't in the main game as they become much more tedious and finicky near the end. For the smaller builds, there's a fun diorama of what it's like to build flatpack furniture but more complex builds have awkward camera settings and some pretty poor visuals.

For more to do in each level, there is a new unpacking task, where you have to take items from boxes and place them around the room. Unlike 2021's rather brilliant Unpacking, they don't have a designated spot so you can place them pretty much anywhere in the room to finish it. Each individual room has quests to finish and a vision mode highlights remaining dirt, making dirt much easier to spot. These all come together to streamline the cleaning experience into a much more arcadey process. Projects may take less long but, to me, they're a lot more fun. Painting has been changed up this time, feeling much closer to window cleaning. It can be a bit tough on the wrist moving your mouse up and down so much but it's a good change that makes upgrading houses much quicker.

Speaking of working quicker, perks make a return here, which allows some moment-to-moment progression but don't expect them to keep you occupied for long as you can beat the main game and finish all levels in just a matter of hours. If you managed to sink more than ten hours into the previous game though, this isn't why you are here.

When you get through all the emails and finally pick out the house you want to renovate, this is where you are given true freedom to smash down any wall, make new floors, and more. When you get here, it starts to make the rest of the game feel like the real tutorial, much like that feeling of confidence you get after beating the singleplay campaign for a shooter only to get your butt handed to you in online play. It's great, even if the tedium of not getting it right is a bit of a challenge.

As well as this, a sandbox mode gives you the ability to snap constructs together and can even be shared online for others to check out. House Flipper 2, on launch, is an upgrade from the original in almost every way, as long as you won't miss those installations mini-games but much of the fun of the next year will be down to what the community does with it and I hope they do a lot.

A code was provided for critique purposes

свернуть