There are few games I’ve spent more than 200 hours with. Skyrim. Baldur’s Gate 3. The Witcher.
And House Flipper.
Yes, I’ve spent 200 hours of my life renovating and selling virtual houses.
The original House Flipper has been one of the most relaxing games I’ve ever played. The concept is simple: clean up and renovate houses, putting your own interior decorating touches on the home before auctioning it off, hopefully to make a profit. But when I loaded House Flipper 2 up on PS5, I did so with some trepidation. Would the sequel live up to the original? And does it work as well on consoles as PC?
When I played the demo of House Flipper 2 on PC last year, I had some concerns that the game was becoming overly complicated; too much of a replication of the real-world hassle of renovating houses.
Thankfully, the team behind the game have taken that feedback and found a good balance in House Flipper 2, refining the tools and graphics from the original game, while retaining the chilled-out atmosphere that made the first game so successful. There’s nothing like watching the sun rise over the ocean while you’re renovating a beach front shack.
However, it’s not without its issues, many of which relate specifically to playing on consoles, which I’ll get into in a minute. But first, let’s look at what’s new in House Flipper 2.
Streamlined tools
After several DLCs, the original House Flipper tool kit felt bloated with grappling hooks, drones, and building options. In House Flipper 2, this menu has been streamlined to a single wheel, and the game is better for it.
One of the best changes is in expanding the use of the flipper tool. Instead of just using it to spam sell, sell, sell on all the junky items in the houses, you can now use it to duplicate items, copy and paste styles, find the same items in the store, and change the style of an item. No more selling and replacing items when you’re trying to figure out exactly which window you’re looking for. This is particularly useful when renovating ramshackle houses; fix up one item to the style you want, then copy and paste that style to every door, window, and kitchen cupboard. Of course, not all items can be rescued, but a lot of them can with these simple changes.
The dirt minimap has been replaced with flipper sense; for the most part, it’s a helpful change when you want to see what to sell or put in the trash. But trying to find that last little piece of trash is much harder when the yellow highlight blends into surfaces. My kingdom for the minimap!
Big, bad wall building
House Flippers will rejoice in the new bricklaying tool, which allows you to build walls wherever you like. You can get pretty creative with this. Want an outdoor toilet? No problem. Want a new balcony? Easy as. But the bricklaying tool can be a bit finicky on consoles, struggling in the 3D environment. When you think you’re building a single line of bricks, you’ll accidentally send it out for several metres into the air, then have to break it down again.
Diagonal surfaces are also an issue here. Many houses have slanted ceilings, which make it difficult to build around. While there are triangular building blocks in the new architectural elements menu, it seems impossible to recreate some of the building surfaces if you accidentally knock them down. Walls will sometimes build through rooftops, and I’d like to see this issue addressed in future patches.
Decorating surfaces: more flexibility, less daggy tiles
And there are some changes that could be good or bad, depending on how you feel about them. No longer can you quickly floor multiple rooms by stretching flooring out in a single click. You’ll need to place panels in the same way you tile. In some ways, this allows for much more flexibility around surfaces; you can change the patterns and sizing of tiles and floorboards in a greater variety of colours and options. It’s fine in smaller houses, but frustrating when you’ve got a large footprint to cover.
Having painted my office, let me tell you that painting in House Flipper 2 is a much more realistic experience than the first. And it’s better for it; the roller goes on with ease, you can usually see where you’ve missed a spot, and it makes a satisfying painting sound. There’s no waiting for paint to slick up the columns one by one.
Setting paint areas is a welcome addition to avoid painting over things you like, such as wall panelling. It would have been nice to see this area setting ported across to surface installation as well; sometimes I wanted to limit the tiling to a certain area but had to tile a line one by one.
The colour menus have been updated to a greater array of shades, from drab to vibrant. If you want to paint your house poo green with purple highlights, you absolutely can. Thankfully, the patterns have also been updated with a variety of modern and classic styles, and again, can be customised to your heart’s content. In fact, the level of customisation is one of the highlights of House Flipper 2; no more dated stripes and florals on your curtains.
Sell, sell, sell
So once you’ve decorated your beautiful house, it’s time to auction it off. Gone are the finicky buyers of the original (remember stuffing the office full of expensive furniture for Dolan Trusk?), replaced by more anonymous and diverse buyers who will offer you a price. It’s worth upgrading the sales skills to receive more money during the auction; after testing it for myself, it makes a sizeable difference to the final price. But I miss the wacky personalities of those buyers; the lady who demanded art on each wall, the dude who wanted speakers in every room.
Room definitions are also gone, perhaps in recognition of the fluid boundaries of house spaces post-pandemic. You can have an office in a bedroom, a bathroom in a kitchen. It’s less about trying to build specific rooms than creating something that you like. But it would also be nice to know what to do to increase the price. In House Flipper, you knew that adding as many bedrooms as you could would increase the price. Here, I’m not so sure.
There’s also been a little more work done to elaborate on the narratives that were brought in through the DLCs. Each house has an owner and a story behind it. These are more earnest than some of the satirical houses of the original game, but it’s a nice touch to personalise the work you do.
Clicky, clicky consoles
One of the biggest issues I find in games that have been ported across from PC to consoles is control. A mouse is designed for precision on a smaller screen; consoles are often played with joystick controllers on a couch. There’s a big difference in the fine motor control you can get with a PS5 controller vs a mouse, and it really shows on House Flipper.
The mess in some of the houses is quite small and finicky to pick up. While you can upgrade the trash collection tool to batch collect, you can’t upgrade the flipper tool to batch sell. It means you need to pick up every little thing, shuffling along the controller joystick millimetre by millimetre as you try to sell a narrow pencil, only to sell the carpet instead.
How to get around this? Well, you might not know that you can actually plug in a keyboard and mouse to a PlayStation 5 USB port. This might not be as practical if you’re trying to chill out on the couch, but at least it’s less frustrating. To otherwise get around this would require significant work from the developers in thinking about how the tools could be adjusted to work better on consoles.
Sandbox Mode
One of the notable new features of House Flipper 2 is a sandbox mode, which I managed to break in about 2 minutes. Granted, I was trying to break it. I dug myself a hole I couldn’t get out of, then ended up floating in space.
When it works, you can create your own houses and share them with the wider community as house flipping projects. Alongside the usual house building tools are tools for shaping the environment and adding trash, dirt, and other tasks for players.
Personally, I’m more interested in what other people are creating than making my own. These mods add a whole new life to the game after finishing the official tasks and houses, because there are hundreds of creator-made houses to flip. Some of them are quite impressive, ranging from haunted houses to the village in Spirited Away.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a relaxing game, House Flipper 2 meets the brief of the original, while providing a streamlined, upgraded experience.
While it will take you several hours to play through the main jobs, there are many more hours to be spent renovating and selling the houses available through the coastal and forest suburbs. It’s clear from the map that there are two more areas at least to open up, likely through DLCs, if the previous model is anything to go by. One looks like a downtown apartment area, and the other, perhaps a luxury suburb?
Given the worldwide housing crisis, these kinds of houses are out of reach for many people. But for the rest of us, House Flipper provides a relaxing escape to a world where a beachfront shack costs 100,000 dollars. I can only dream.
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