I haven’t spoken about it at all on this blog but I’m something of a DIYer. Whilst I had humble beginnings, fixing doors and replacing light fixtures, it soon graduated into a full on crusade culminating in my wife and I building a large workshop in our backyard. So when I stumbled across House Flipper, a game that essentially simulates what I’ve been doing IRL for the past couple years, I figured it’d be worth giving a try. The game is both strangely accurate in some respects whilst wildly off base in others which, honestly, isn’t out of line for games in this genre. Whilst it might not replace The Sims as the home building game of choice for many just yet it certainly does do a good job of emulating the painful yet rewarding experience that is renovating a home.
You play as a general contractor who’s looking to make a name (and fortune) for themself. You start off with humble beginnings, cleaning up trashed homes and doing minor repairs, but soon your skills graduate into full blown home renovation. You’ll be painting walls, laying flooring, replacing broken outlets and all sorts of other fun tasks that you’ll need to do to transform a run down hovel into a home. You’ll have to figure out the whims of your buyers and create the perfect homes for them so you can extract the maximum amount of profit from the houses you flip. One day you may even be able to upgrade your own place, doing away with your run down shack for something a little more fitting of someone of your stature.
House Flipper is a Unity based game that uses a lot of stock assets and so has that trademark “Unity Game” feel to it. There’s some noticeable performance issues with it however, most of which I think comes from the destructible wall simulation as it seems to get a whole lot worse when you’re swinging a sledge hammer. Still the amount of flexibility that the developers have put into it is commendable as you’re able to change pretty much anything you can see in the house. Probably most interesting is the fact that it also has full simulated night/day cycles, requiring you to turn on the lights if you want to continue renovating in the dark hours of the night. Honestly whilst it has the same trademark janky appearance that many of these simulator games has once you dig beneath the surface it’s actually quite impressive what they’ve managed to get done.
All the mechanics of the game are tasks that you’d be doing if you yourself were going to renovate a house IRL. The initial tutorial missions give you an insight into the various mechanics like cleaning, painting, tiling and adding/removing walls. You can keep doing those for quite a while if you want and it doesn’t take long for you to be making a decent amount of cash with each job. From there the next stage is flipping houses where you’ll spend time fixing up the place and then tailoring it to your buyer’s desires. Whilst you’re renovating a list of potential buyers shows up on the left hand side and they’ll comment on the changes you make. The one at the top is the person who will eventually buy the place and so it’s key to pay attention to what they’re saying. However many of the things you can do in renovating a house don’t mean anything to the potential buyers which, honestly, irks me to no end.
The initial missions are actually quite enjoyable as you have a fixed outcome you need to achieve before you can get paid. The devs have obviously had a great time setting up the various scenarios, like the college student party house where the tenants stole all the radiators, and completing all the tasks is a rather relaxing affair. You’ll quickly level up the various skills doing these missions as well and it quickly becomes obvious that not all of the upgrades are created equal. For instance the upgraded mop is far, far better than the increased cleaning speed and painting multiple walls at once is great only if you have the upgrade to not use paint on already painted surfaces. Once you’ve got that all mastered it’s time to flip some houses which, if you’re playing to the game’s mechanics, is actually boringly simple.
You see your potential buyers have in-built traits for things they want and things they don’t. As you go around fixing things up they’ll likely make a comment on what they like/hate and that can help you hone in on who you’d prefer to buy that particular property. However it gets weird really quickly as it’s not so much about what they lke but what they hate. For instance, in order to make one house attractive to the student I had to fill it with children’s toys to make sure that the other buyers wouldn’t like it. Similarly the only way I could figure out to discourage the old couple (who apparently likes multiple bedrooms but was just fine with a tiny house with only 1 room) was to leave empty paint cans around since they hate mess. Worse still the most time consuming things, like painting walls or replacing the siding on the house, seem to have absolutely no effect on what the buyers want. This leads to a weird game of cat and mouse where you try to figure out the right combination of dumb things to add in whilst ensuring you only pay attention to a select few items to renovate.
Of course in the end it doesn’t matter who buys the place (unless you’re going for achievements), the person at the top will pay the most and it seems that unless you really go wild with the renos you’ll always make some kind of profit. I’m sure there’s people out there who’ll enjoy doing up a place nicely just for the sake of it, heck I even did that a bit in the first place, but if you’re playing to the game’s core mechanics then there’s not really a lot of point. I’m sure the buyers AI will get tweaked at some stage to be a little more discerning as I really don’t want to have to play a game of “fill the house with things other buyers hate” every time I want to flip a place.
At the moment it I’d probably class this more as “interior decorator simulator” more than anything else. Whilst all the things you do here are most certainly realistic when it comes to home renos there are some omissions which make it fall short of a true renovation simulator. For instance you can’t seem to change the place where the plumbing runs for the sink, even though you can absolutely move the shower around as much as you want. Similarly the wiring for lights and switches seems to just be for whatever room they’re in which, IRL, isn’t always the case. It’d be great if they had something like a structural view which allowed you to see all the pipe and electrical runs in the walls and you had to contend with them when you were doing demolition. Maybe in a future update something like that will come.
House Flipper certainly isn’t for everyone but if you, like me, are one of the few who have feet in both the gamer and DIY camps then it’s definitely worth having a look at. Whilst it is unmistakably an indie Unity game that belies the huge amount of work that went into developing the simulation engine to support it. The core mechanics are solid and the initial jobs you take are a great way to get into it. The house auctions are a little too weird and unpredictable for my tastes and ultimately that’s what made me put the game down for now. However this is one of those games that I’m sure will mature over time and, if the devs open it up to Steam Workshop, there’d be an endlesly supply of new content for it going forward. If another trip to Bunnings isn’t in the budget then maybe a copy of House Flipper might be on the books.
Rating: 7.75/10
House Flipper is available on PC right now for $19.99. Total play time was 4 hours with 17% of the achievements unlocked.
