Welcome to Lio Gaming Game Reviews. If you’re looking for find a relaxing game to play into your Xbox One to de-stress, you’ve come to the right place. House Flipper is an unusual simulation game where you repair and renovate houses in order to sell them and make a profit.
House Flipper is a house renovating simulator I’ve always wanted, living out my property owning dreams. This type of game usually has a more detached style of gameplay, lot of menus and an overhead view. House Flipper puts you into a first person game, moving through the houses and getting you much more involved in the process. I think I now have a much more comprehensive understanding of how my household appliances are plumbed in after playing it, anyway! There are two main modes to the game, paid missions where a client asks you to do up their home to their specifications, and the more free house flipping where you purchase a property and improve it as you want to.
Once you are done renovating your space you can send it to auction or if you’ve gotten a bit too attached, you can choose to keep it for yourself as your new office. The missions are a good way to build up your bank balance initially and teach you the mechanics of the game. They are also good fun in their own right as there are no time limits or pressure. You can even leave the mission without completing every single task and still get paid if a particular mission isn’t holding your interest.
It’s not the prettiest game, but it’s not exactly trying to be. It would probably benefit from a little more intentional art direction but the game doesn’t suffer for it. It would definitely be better if there was a larger catalogue of objects included to choose from when furnishing your homes though, however there is a very active mod community on steam with everything from antique radiators to stacks of Pokemon cards. And of course, you can always create objects yourself if you like messing around in Blender (or any other 3D graphics software of course).
I also really appreciate that there is an option to change the cockroaches to instead be displayed as broken glass. I don’t have an issue with bugs but if they were large writhing masses of spiders I would definitely have taken that broken glass option. It’s just nice to see these things being thought of by the developers. There are some issues with the game. It would be nice if some objects were able to clip through each other in some situations, I never manage to hang curtains because there is always something blocking them, for example It can also pass over the line into tedious from time to time during the missions when there is a lot of painting or tiling to do, and I genuinely strained my trigger finger when painting at one point and had to take a few days away from gaming completely over Christmas so I’m maybe holding a bit of a grudge.
I’ve really enjoyed playing House Flipper, so much that I’m considering buying the gardening DLC. It’s one of those games that it is so easy to get completely caught up in and sink far too many hours into. If furnishing houses was your favorite part of the Sims games, this will definitely suit you. And so, House Flipper earns the Lio Gaming’s Seal of Approval.
The game is House Flipper, developed by Empyrean. It retails at £15.49 and is available for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC. Thank you so much for reading.