D.I.Y SOS (House Flipper)

Game: House Flipper
Available On: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Mac
Played On: Xbox One
Price: £24.99 (Xbox) £19.99 (PS4)
Available on Xbox Game Pass or PSnow?: No

Have you ever watched those shows on reality tv channels that come in around mid day? You know the ones, someone finds an old dilapidated, run down house and magically decide to turn it into something amazing on a shoestring budget, all in the space of a week and sell it for massive profit. The ones that are clearly scripted and the people in the shows have clearly done no work at all, you know the ones. Well how about a game that’s basically that?? This is house flipper, a 2018 release developed by Empyrean and published by Frozen District, PlayWay and Merge Games.

Quick one, I have played this game briefly on pc but today I’ll be reviewing the console version.

The objectives of the game are simple, it’s in the title, but houses, do them up and sell them for profit, what could be easier? Again there’s no real sandbox mode so you start your career and sadly before you can get you hands on a house, you start out as an odd jobs man. The first few missions really start off as your tutorials for all the different tools you can use, as well as how fit certain appliances and place bits of furniture. Eventually you will get more complex orders meaning multiple rooms need multiple things done to them in many cases. There are t too many ‘story’ missions to do and you’ll be done with these pretty quickly. But if you wish you can return and replay any of them.

There is a sort of levelling system, doing certain things means you can upgrade certain perks. You’ll want yo do these as soon as you get the perk points as you can speed up some of the more tedious tasks such as painting walls which can be very time consuming and repetitive. This is something the game suffers with sadly and really meant I found myself playing for not much more that 1-2 hours at a time.

The main seller for this game is the buying a run down property and doing it up. This is available very early on in the game but sadly a lot of the house models are the same, but to think on the positive means you can try multiple things with the spaces. As you build you will see your potential buyers on the side and you can even start tailoring your renovation to suit these people. There really is a lot of freedom and I cannot stress this enough, taking one of these beat up houses and turning into a glorious house is incredibly satisfying and beyond relaxing, and the controls all work well and are easy to use so a big plus there.

But sadly you are slightly curved with your freedom as you can’t extent the house or build multiple floors which is a massive shame. It does limit what you can do and especially with the small spaces you get early on it can be frustrating as you just want to let’s the creative juices flow. But sadly this doesn’t seem like it’s changing anytime soon, you can’t even make the gardens better.

Ultimately as far as satisfying gameplay and good controls can carry the game far, there is a slight feeling the game is massively overpriced for what’s its offering. Yes in the PC there is a garden building DLC but I’m sure if that comes to console then we will be asked to fork over more cash for it and after potentially forking over £25 it leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth, even £20 for PS4, but as always I’m not one to put a price on other people art and if they feel that’s fair then that is their call. Just maybe wait for a sale.

The game feels like a skeleton of a game, it lacks so much content it really is a shame. By all means get this game, it’s not a bad game just I feel what it’s offering isn’t enough. It plays well, it is fun but sadly when you see its price, it all comes crumbling down.

4.5/10

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