Cleaning a room, picking up garbage, scrubbing walls, and taking out the trash. They all sound like chores but they are also key mechanics in House Flipper 2. Having not played the first game, I wasn’t sure how much fun those systems would be. Especially over an extended period of time. Well, it’s been two weeks since I started flipping houses and taking names on consoles and I can’t stop. House Flipper 2 is a fun and streamlined simulator that is easy to play and unusually addicting.
Before I get ahead of myself, let’s start with the basics. In House Flipper 2, you play as someone who has moved back to your hometown in Pinnacove after your parents move out to live their best lives. You are left with a rundown childhood home and in desperate need of money before you can make renovations. Luckily, an old friend calls you and gets you started. At first, you just clean up the mess after a raccoon break-in but soon you’ll be purchasing houses, renovating and decorating them before flipping them for a profit. (Keep in mind, you can ignore the story entirely and play the Sandbox mode.)
When it comes to gameplay, you have a variety of tools at your disposal from a simple spray bottle and brush to the fancy Flipper tool. When you accept a mission, areas that need your attention will be marked with a yellow exclamation mark. Going to these areas and holding R1 will open your tool menu where more yellow exclamation marks will indicate what tools are needed in that area. (For example, if you have to sell a bunch of items, the Flipper tool will be marked.) As you complete the job, your rating will go up, initially hitting one star, then two, and ultimately, three. Which earns you the biggest payout.
House Flipper 2 is nothing if not approachable. If, at any point, you start to wonder what’s left to scrub, sell, or vacuum, you can press R1 on the DualSense. This sends out a ping that temporarily highlights relevant items and areas. As you progress in the game, you will also get the ability to paint walls and lay down tiles. These are not just useful for jobs but also for your own home improvement. That was the thing that surprised me the most about my time with House Flipper 2; I found the core mechanics so engaging that I actually started renovating my in-game childhood home just for the hell of it.
There are a few other quick things I want to highlight. House Flipper 2 has a flexible perk system that, much like the rest of the game, is easy to understand. The more you do a certain action (taking out trash or painting walls) the more you level up in that particular field. These let you complete your action faster or better. (Bigger trash bag or longer paint roll, etc.) Then there’s the assembly mode. This tasks you with building an item from the store (like a photo frame) and rewards you by lowering the price of the item forever. Lastly, though I didn’t mess around with it too much, even the console edition of House Flipper 2 has mod support. Which is a nice touch.
When it comes to visuals, House Flipper 2 dances the line between realistic and stylized. Things look real and are appropriately sized but they might not all hold up to close-up scrutiny. Which, to be honest, is perfectly fitting for the game. The sound design is similarly pleasant with menu effects and even the background score going well together. My only real gripe here is that the voice acting is not great. No real emotion comes through on the client’s dialogue, and it can sometimes lead to the game feeling lifeless. However, some of the more crowded neighborhood areas help disperse that feeling.
After a few months on PC, House Flipper 2 has made the jump to consoles and that’s how I’m playing the game. There is no performance/quality mode options in the settings but performance is good regardless. There are very occasional frame drops and most of them happened when playing the new Floor is Lava mini-game. The game does have an FOV slider though, which I always appreciate. And, for any concerned parties, the controls translate well to the controller. After the tutorial-like first job, the buttons become pretty intuitive, even as your toolset grows.
I also have one wish for the game. I find the process of renovating spaces in the game satisfying but a Powerwash Simulator-esque timelapse feature would go a long way in driving that feeling home. Seeing a recap of everything you did and seeing a room or house go from the messes they often are to the livable spaces you turn them into would enhance the experience a lot. I would love to see this feature in a future update.
House Flipper 2 is an unexpectedly addicting game that brings together simple simulator gameplay mechanics to make a satisfying end result. While it does have a story mode, that’s not really what the experience is about. Whether you want to zone out and deconstruct an attic or listen to a podcast while decorating a basement, this game lets you live out some of your HGTV fantasies in a much more affordable way. It might not have a lot of surprises up its sleeve but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a good game. House Flipper 2 is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
