Review: House Flipper 2 Builds on Sturdy Foundations

In 2018, House Flipper filled a niche in the building sim genre not quite realized before. Now, House Flipper 2 is here, and Frozen District and Empyrean seemed to follow the motto, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

House Flipper 2 offers a lot of what you’ll be familiar with from the first game. The main gameplay loop is the same. You’re a flipper and you take on jobs around your city. These start as simply just cleaning up garbage, but grow to be full scale renovations. Eventually, this leads to you to buying and renovating homes to sell. While this is more or less the same loop as before, the process is streamlined. Accessing different tools and gear feels natural, and the current quests offer clear objectives and checklists.

One complaint I had is it seems the game eases you into it a little too slowly. You don’t unlock the ability to do certain jobs, such as painting or tiling, until a quest requires it. You spend the first few hours picking up garbage before you ever get to pick up a paint roller. I would have liked options to be a little more open to me right away. However, given the choices you can make in these renovations, that may have been overwhelming.

Once you do have access to all your tools, it’s impressive how much control you have. During renovations and when buying new furniture, you can tweak everything from the build quality to the color. Even seemingly minor details, such as whether a door opens from the left or the right, are completely up to your discretion. This is where the game shines. It gets out of the way and lets you go to town. There are plenty of tools at your disposal. From knocking down walls to putting down tile, your only constraints are your money and quest objectives. Often, you’ll find yourself working within certain constraints in the campaign. However, most of the time it still gave you a tremendous amount of leeway within those confines.

When you’re not tackling quests, you can actually build up your own home in House Flippers 2. Between quests, you’re sent back to the house (which your parents in-game gave you for free) to use your money for whatever you want. I spent hours between some missions just messing around, trying out different things and making it my own.

The game gives you that chance to experiment. Most things you buy you can sell right back for no loss. This means you can, quite literally, throw things at the wall to see if they stick. And, it’s pretty easy to fix a mistake or redo a room you don’t like.

You can even assemble your own furniture and gear. This is a separate minigame during which you have to use the tools correctly to create the item. While I found this to be not much use to me as I played, I’m sure there are some fans out there who will make a lot of use of the feature. I experienced that a lot in this game as a relatively casual fan to this genre. I found myself constantly thinking, “Wow, someone is going to put a lot of work in using this.” That’s the fun of these types of games I think. You can, to an extent, play your own way.

If you played the first game and found it fun, you’ll really enjoy the gameplay here. It’s so familiar, yet built on enough to see improvements. They didn’t reinvent the wheel, but they did make another really good wheel. One new addition is a very welcome Sandbox Mode. This is separate from the main campaign and is basically just a big playground. It gives you even more creativity and lets you more or less run wild within the games limits. You can even create your own custom jobs to send to friends. Usually, in crafting games like this, I struggle to actually build things from scratch. However, once I jumped into Sandbox Mode in House Flipper 2, I was able to pretty easily build a functioning house from the ground up. The game really balances the complexity of the customization with the ease of execution.

Overall, I think there’s a lot of content in House Flipper 2. It doesn’t try to do too much and really understands why people pick these kinds of games up. Additionally, the first game got a lot of really solid DLC. It’s possible that House Flippers 2 will eventually get some new content down the road. However, I’m not even sure what I’d want in a game about house flipping and renovation that House Flippers 2 doesn’t already offer. I’ll always take some more items and build options though.

Graphically, the game is solid, but nothing to write home about. There’s enough detail in the items and furniture to help you make choices, such as glossy or matte plastic actually showing up differently on the models. This helps to immerse you in the experience better. The little details, especially visual ones, are things the first game couldn’t do so they’re very welcome here.

However, in my time with the game I did find there were a few too many technical issues to ignore. Nothing was major or game breaking, but problems were frequent enough to be frustrating. One major issue is that it seems like the game struggled to understand when I have turned motion blur off. Sometimes the game would just decide it wanted to do it anyway. This is obviously quite jarring, especially when it’s only for a few seconds at a time. Another technical hiccup was randomly losing all speed. The character would walk around like they were over-encumbered in Skyrim. As far as I know, this isn’t some byproduct of the gameplay that I missed, but a random technical issue. More than once I had to completely restart to fix this.

The game isn’t priced like a AAA title, so I’m more lenient than I would be with a full priced game. However, if it only happened a couple times it wouldn’t be enough to mention at all. Three or four times per session though? Yeah, I think that needs ironing out. The game is far from a buggy mess or anything, and actually ran quite well. It’s just a few small issues stuck out like sore thumbs in an otherwise mostly smooth experience. Luckily, these issues could potentially be addressed in the future.

If you’re a fan of this genre, I don’t think you could find a better game in it than House Flipper 2. Some of the edges need a little sanding, but that polish could come from patches or future DLC. However, these hiccups don’t hold the game back and it’s still a blast to sink hours into.

House Flipper 2 is now available on PCs. The scheduled release date for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S is March 21, 2024.