House Flipper 2 Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Fast Facts

This Old House… Needs Cleaned.

I am no slouch in the simulation genre of games. I have played, previewed and reviewed dozens of simulation-style games. Recently, I played a game where I was running an arcade, a hotel, a gas station, and completing construction projects. Last month, House Flipper 2 – the sequel to the 2018 game – arrived on PC via Steam, with releases on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S coming in the future. 

The main campaign of House Flipper 2 has you jumping into a new role as a budding architect and house flipper in a small community called Pinnacove. Pinnacove is broken up into three sections: suburbs, woods and beach. Within each community, you are tasked with taking on a variety of house flip projects. These projects vary from cleaning up after a party, remodeling a cabin that is going to be used in a movie set, fixing up a cafe and more.

Mission-Minded Remodeling

When first booting up House Flipper 2 you will be greeted by a character called Tom Marino. He helps you to get started in your career and learn the ropes. From your smart phone you can direct your attention to emails from potential customers, an auction area to purchase new homes to flip and other options. When arriving on-site, the homeowner who hired you might make suggestions of things to work on. These tasks start small, such as cleaning up, taking out trash, scrubbing grime from windows and floors, painting and tiling. 

As you complete jobs, you accumulate EXP on your tools. You also unlock ways to speed up the process of completing some of the mundane tasks. For example, early in the game, I unlocked the ability to enlarge my paint brush. This allowed me to cover a larger area when painting, and made the process faster. You can also take a break from the day-to-day work and take on assembly tasks. These smaller jobs put you at a workbench where you will need to unpack and put together furniture. Completing assembly jobs quickly unlocks discounts for future furniture purchases.

A Belt Full of Tools

House Flipper 2 is a bit of a unique game in terms of the simulation genre. While it may not excite the majority of people, the laid-back gameplay loop can be intriguing. While walking around houses, you will need to use a variety of tools, and these are pulled up from a radial menu. This makes House Flipper 2 feel a lot like a first-person shooter game. Your tools consist of a hammer for knocking down walls, a bricklayer for building new walls, a paintbrush, a tiling tool, a vacuum and a spray bottle.

The in-game storefront in House Flipper 2 has a variety of items that you can use to place within your property. These are organised into categories such as bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, family room, dining, and more. The categorisation of items allows for creativity with regard to where you can place them. You can place items on top of others, such as books on shelves or paintings on walls. You can also swap textures of paint, wallpaper designs, and tile cut patterns.

Make Your Dream House in Sandbox Mode

The campaign jobs you get from community members often have some sort of completion objectives. Campaign “To-Dos” might include certain furniture needing to be purchased and placed in set rooms, or the construction of various spaces, such as the creation of a new bathroom or opening up a wall to make an area bigger.

As you move from room to room and select certain tools you will see how much you still need to do. For instance, having the paintbrush or tile tool selected will show wall, ceiling, and floor spaces that need to be completed. Using the vacuum cleaner will show you a progress bar on how much of the floor still needs to be cleaned. Using the spray bottle will show you how much dirt and grime you still need to remove.

Along with showing the number of spots to clean or furniture items yet to be placed, your ‘Flipper Vision’ can help identify problem yellow areas that you are yet to address. Flipper Vision is similar to other games that have an echo-location sense and is very helpful in finding pesky footprints or stains on floors and walls.

Sadly, House Flipper 2 isn’t made up of all good things though. There were instances of lag as I played through some of the houses, and loading screens can be a bit long as you move from house to office locations. I didn’t notice texture pop-in, but from time to time my character would skip ahead some frames or lag out of control. I had one hard crash in the game and lost all the progress on the home I was working on, which was depressing as it was over an hour of gameplay that I lost. 

Near-Endless Options For Creativity

House Flipper 2 has a complete sandbox mode as well where you can share your creations of final flipped houses or set up job for others to complete. I have spent another fifteen hours in the sandbox mode along with my daughter creating our dream homes. There are also numerous auction houses that I have yet to purchase and complete though I do intend to. The main campaign took me roughly 20 hours to complete with all of the tool upgrades. Along with mod.io support and a robust community, House Flipper 2 has a lot of possibilities for simulation game of the year nominations in 2024. 

If you are looking to fulfil some house-flipping dreams of your own, House Flipper 2 will scratch that itch. There is a ton to do and enough variety in the campaign that will keep you busy for dozens of hours. When you tack on the sandbox mode and modding community, there is no end in sight for House Flipper fans.

4 out of 5

4

You can find and read our reviews on OpenCritic.

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