House Flipper 2 Review – Manual Labor Made Fun

House Flipper 2 on PC

Let me start off by saying I’m not usually the kind of person to play, let alone enjoy, the kind of simulation games that gamify a difficult and work-heavy concept. Enter House Flipper 2, a game that makes the hard work of cleaning and renovating homes an honest-to-god relaxing and enjoyable experience. House Flipper 2 accomplishes this by simplifying the actions of everything you do.

Normally, scrubbing clean almost every interior surface of your house would take hours, if not days. On the flip side, House Flipper 2 makes such a chore quite chill by only demanding you aim at the dirty smudge and press a button. Waiting for the task’s completion over a few seconds is the only difficulty involved. Even then, the perks you unlock for each varied task only helps to improve the speed at which you renovate a house.

And renovating is something you will be doing quite a bit during the game’s story missions. Each one comes with a bit of story baked in that can be sweet and memorable. Like the one time I renovated a grandmother’s attic to turn it into a bedroom for her grandson to stay over. The mission even came with a few toys and books that I could unpack and place for him to enjoy. It’s the little touches like this that made the game’s tasks more wholesome than I expected.

Speaking of tasks, the tools which the game gives you in order to interact with the game’s environment are extensive. From trash pickup, cleaning, and painting, to tilework, the wiring of lights, and sledgehammering down walls, House Flipper 2 gives you essentially everything you need to properly transform a room to something I’d honestly love to live in. Which is fun to explore when you’ve earned enough money to start buying houses to fix up and then auction or move into yourself.

This is where the freedom, creativity, and flexibility of House Flipper 2 really shines. When you buy a house, you can change almost any aspect of it. In fact, I had a lot of fun simply retiling a bathroom, adding trash cans and laundry bins while choosing the kind shower and toilet that I prefer in real life. The game has hundreds of items to choose from with a dozen or more from each category you could think of wanting access to—making it easy to get inspired.

If you thought the freedom that came with buying and flipping houses without quests tied to them was open-ended then the Sandbox mode will certainly delight. Because in this mode, you build your own house from scratch, that even allows for the changing of the plot of land’s topography, including the placement of outside based items as well. Even cooler, is that you can create your own story mission-style quests for other people to solve/renovate as you can upload your house to Mod.io for others to fix up for themselves.

Now, should House Flipper 2 have launched with more base items, objects, and styles? Yes, but that’s what the likely dozen themed follow-up DLCs will cover for better or for worse. And while House Flipper 2 is a good game on its own merits, it is certainly not the best sequel. The first place to start is the game’s presentation, the soundtrack alone is half of why the game is slow relaxing, charming, and wholesome at times. Meanwhile, the graphics have received quite the change, moving to a more stylized approach but with a better lighting engine.

I personally love the visuals as well as their style, but what I didn’t love was the performance. Now, I have a pretty beefy laptop with a 3080mobile and at 1440p I struggled to maintain 60fps with DLSS on! It was shocking to see how unoptimized the game felt when everything outside of the homes you are renovating take a huge graphical leap backwards. Another misstep involves the lack of a minimap from the first game.

The minimap served as an easy way to find the objectives you needed to interact with. However, in the sequel you have a special sense that highlights objects around you a dull yellow, telling you what you need to do with what tool you’re using. Or at least that’s the goal. In practice, I found this sense to be only mostly reliable.

There were times that I struggled for much longer than I should have to find the thing my sense was telling me was there. Only to discover that 20 minutes later, there was a single small smudge under the kitchen table I couldn’t see because of the wallpaper’s similar color. That, combined with the lack of any other visual feedback other than the smudge’s simple yellow colorization, left me frustrated and wanting something better. Additionally, the first game’s before and after screenshots would have been a really nice touch here and stands out as an odd omission that is really so effective at showing you all of the changes you made at once.

All in all, House Flipper 2 is a great game, but only a good sequel. The features and visuals have certainly been expanded compared to the first game with some caveats. However, it hurts to see what features the developers have chosen to leave behind. Especially when those features were things that players coming from the first game reasonably expected to continue enjoying. Hopefully, the developers will continue to listen to player feedback and continue to expand the game’s content and scope for when it launches on consoles in 2024.