House Flipper 2 Review
House Flipper 2 starts with our character returning to their family home. They are left in charge of renovating the house and to do this they must raise some funds by taking on various odd jobs to get enough cash to start flipping properties. A pretty straightforward story, but a functional one.
From your office laptop, you can choose from a number of different jobs and clients with more unlocking the further you get in the game. The first 5 or so hours of House Flipper 2 will have you cleaning and decorating other people’s property before the option to even start buying and flipping your own becomes an option.
Each of the earlier Jobs is designed to teach you a skill which will become vital when it comes time to buy and sell. You’ll start off with some light cleaning, teaching you the fundamentals of cleaning stains, rubbish and unwanted furniture.
Houses you visit for jobs are split into different areas denoted by the Yellow exclamation marks. Each of these ‘areas’ will require different things as per the request of the client. You’ll spend a lot of time answering your phone to clients (although you can choose to ignore them if you want) they’ll fill you in on the Job in general as well as any special requests they may have such as moving an item to certain room etc.
As you progress through the client’s Jobs you’ll eventually move on to wallpapering, laying flooring and painting. Painting is pretty interesting, you first need to mark out your areas to be painted which will put some painter’s tape around the area before having to drag the roller using the left analog stick or mouse. It feels pretty realistic.
Paint (and all other materials) can be purchased at any time from the menu and will come out of the budget from that job, the less you spend the better. I never seemed to spend over budget but there are ways of obtaining extra cash if you get caught short.
To make some additional money, you can always sell some of the client’s unwanted furniture and items and often this will be one of the Jobs objectives. You also be awarded a monetary amount upon completion of the job depending on how well you performed.
There’s a star rating system present with the maximum award being 3 Stars. If you follow most of the quest instructions, you’ll easily reach the 3-star award. On the other hand, if you’re really not feeling a certain job (or client) you can opt to do a half-hearted job and finish up as soon as you reach 1 star, the choice is yours.
I’d recommend sticking through each Job early on as you’ll earn perk points with each task you are performing making future jobs and flips a lot easier. For example, you can spend a painting perk point to unlock a feature that expands your paint roller making painting large areas less of a workout for your wrist.
Eventually, you’ll be able to start flipping houses. You’ll be putting all your skills picked up from previous jobs to clean, renovate and decorate a property from scratch, this time with no guidance.
This can be pretty tough as it’s very hands off and you have a lot of freedom to decorate and renovate the house in a style you see fit. You can choose from various different types of furniture, each of which can be selected in a color scheme and finish of your choosing. Although I did find the interface of choosing colors and items from the same collection a little annoying and I really wished it would remember the last scheme chosen rather than defaulting to the original color each time as it just made selecting cupboards etc a little tedious. That said, once your property is all finished, it’s quite rewarding and you feel a nice sense of accomplishment.
House Flipper 2 has had quite the graphical overhaul in comparison to the original House Flipper and it even looks really impressive at times. Map’s are colorful and vibrant with textures being of a much better quality than the original.
The animations are now much better with different tools being switched in and out naturally as you clean and renovate properties.
There’s even a default graphical preset for Steam Deck users, although I found the implementation of AMD’s FSR to be terrible and really blurry (see below image). This profile will give you 40 – 45fps ‘out of the box’ on Deck. To have a much nicer experience, I’d recommend turning FSR off and instead setting TAA to medium. I was able to get a solid 30fps with these settings without the screen looking like a blurry mess.
I spent my time split between PC and Steam Deck and I enjoyed the game on both machines, albeit with less graphical fidelity on the Deck.
The in-game music is similar to the Sims etc, quite calming and slightly non-descript while being catchy enough to find yourself humming along. The only criticism I have with the audio is the voice acting when a client calls, some of the performances are a little lacklustre if I had to be 100% honest, Not a deal breaker and weirdly seems in keeping with the game.
On the technical side of things, I’m pleased to say I experienced no crashes or graphical issues while playing through the game, although one time I did manage to get stuck on top of a table and couldn’t move off it. This was easily remedied by simply selling the table underneath me, but a little annoying nonetheless.
Controller support is implemented very well although it feels like House Flipper 2 wants you to use a mouse and keyboard at times. There’s a slight learning curve to the controls, especially if you are hopping between Steam Deck and PC like I was for this review but you quickly acclimatise.
In terms of content, House Flipper 2 is packed. I was genuinely surprized by just how many different properties you could purchase to flip. You could really play this game for hours on end with plenty of content to tide you over until the release of the inevitable DLC packs, which I am all for!
One minor issue I have with House Flipper 2 is that It’s very easy to sell something by mistake. For example, you are selling some pens and books on top of a table, only to accidentally sell the table making everything on top of it fall to the ground. This happened to me often, although mainly when playing via the Steam Deck as I had a little more fine control with the mouse when playing on PC.
As someone who has renovated property before, House Flipper 2 had me wishing it was only this easy in real life. I could paint a room in House Flipper 2 in less than 5 minutes whereas in real life, I’d have to prep the walls, go pick up some paint, grab tools, argue with my wife etc. which would end up taking all day, trust me! The same goes for selling property, I wish things moved that fast in real life but, I guess waiting three months wouldn’t make for the most compelling video game after all.
Conclusion
Overall, House Flipper 2 is a great game to unwind to. I would describe it as a ‘podcast’ game, the perfect thing to play while listening to something else or having a second screen up in the background. There’s great satisfaction to be had from checking off tasks from the Job’s list and enough variety to the different tasks to stop it from becoming repetitive. The core gameplay loop is pretty addictive and I’d often find myself starting another job when I should have really been going to bed. It shares a lot in common with Powerwash Simulator in that respect which is high praise coming from a recovering powerwash addict.
While I wouldn’t rate House Flipper 2 as the best simulator out there, the gameplay loop and general vibe of the game will have you coming back for more well into the future and I’m looking forward to what can be added via DLC.
7.5
Steam review code kindly provided by the Publisher
