Video Game Review: House Flipper

House Flipper

Frozen District

Simulation

Playstation 4, Xbox One

House Flipper was initially released as a PC exclusive in 2018. Putting players in the shoes of a “one-man renovation crew”, House Flipper is a game that I’ve been interested in playing since it first released. I have never cared too much about doing interior decorating myself, but growing up HGTV was always on at my house so somewhere along the line I picked up something of an appreciation for the craft. Being the console player that I am, when the PS4 and XBONE versions launched I was eager to finally get my hands on the game. 

House Flipper, as the title implies, allows players to buy dirty and/or damaged properties and flip them for a profit. By “flip” I mean redesigning the home, from the wall color to the furniture within. However, all houses are an investment and considering you don’t start the game with enough money to buy even the cheapest property you will need alternate methods of income. This is where the mission-based aspect of the game comes into play. 

At the beginning of the game, you will have different requests from clients to handle different tasks at their homes. Many of these missions serve as early-game tutorials that introduce the different tools and abilities at your disposal. When starting out, you’ll often be sent to a fully-furnished house but have specific goals to accomplish like cleaning messes or installing radiators. These missions are nice in the beginning to help players to get their bearings, but once you’re familiar with the controls they become more tedious and repetitive than anything else. 

The real fun comes when you have enough money to purchase your first home. Speaking from my own experience, I purchased the cheapest fire-damaged house and got to work. When renovating a home, you are able to see the wants/needs of each potential buyer as well as see how each design decision in your house affects their opinion either positively or negatively. However, you have complete creative control over the ultimate outcome of your project. For my first home, I didn’t take into consideration any of the potential buyer’s wants beforehand and simply designed the house how I wanted. 

The main tools at your disposal are cleaning, painting, selling, building (walls), buying (furniture and other objects), and demolition. As you use the different abilities you’ll level up and be able to upgrade aspects of the abilities from quicker tile placement to being able to paint multiple wall panels at once. Some of the tools are more fun to use than others, but the hammer is definitely the most satisfying. Simply deleting a wall would be too boring. It’s much more enjoyable to smash your way through to the other side. Something I noted while playing these sections of the game is how much fun this would probably be in VR.

The game puts you in the shoes of a designer in the best and worst ways. You’re given tons of different options for paint and furniture to choose from, but tasks like laying down tiles or wallpaper are incredibly tedious due to having to manually pick up each row of tiles before you place them. Once you upgrade your tiling this annoyance becomes more minimal but it still feels unnecessarily complicated to make users grab and then place rather than being able to place straight from the menu. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t state how incredibly satisfying it is to look at your home after you’ve completely renovated it. I spent a good two-and-a-half hours working on my first home and managed to make a 30k profit when it was all said and done. As I said before, the house flipping is where the game truly shines and I can see myself doing that and enjoying it often.

The game feels a bit clunky in some of its controls and the models don’t always look the best during actions. On top of that, while there are plenty of houses available to buy unless they add more furniture options I wonder if the appeal of house flipping will wear out quickly. I know that the PC version received multiple DLC packages, so hopefully, these will become available to console players eventually. 

If you’re someone who enjoys the home designing elements of The Sims and wants to get more hands-on with the process, give House Flipper a try (you can visit their website here or head straight to the PS store to grab yourself a copy). This is definitely a game I’ll come back to from time to time. In fact, maybe I’ll go buy a house right now…

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