House Flipper is a title that belongs to a special category. ‘Games I Play To Pretend I’m Not The World’s Least Practical Man’. In real life, I can just about manage to change a lightbulb. If I tried to fix a broken electrical socket, I’d probably end up looking like that bloke from Home Alone 2. And as for painting walls, well. The walls would indeed be painted. Problem is, so would everything else. So I quite enjoy games that allow me to fix things up properly. Granted, my patience is far lesser than my sense of aesthetics, so things are still a mess. But at least the lights turn on when I hit the switch.
House Flipper has always been a bit of an odd duck for me, though. Back in the day, I played through all of the jobs in the base game, but never quite got into the flipping aspect. I was more into cleaning up dilapidated houses, and less into looking at wallpaper swatches. But it definitely carved out its own niche, expanding on and improving the ‘cleaning game’ genre. The question, then, is what is gained by remastering it? I don’t want to give away my opinion just yet, but I will say that it is a question that I’m struggling to answer right now.
Fixer Upper
I’ve going to split this review into two halves. First, I’m going to talk about House Flipper Remastered Collection like I’m new to the series, then I’ll dissect the remaster itself. So, House Flipper. It’s a game that very much does what it says on the tin. You walk into a house full of dirt, cockroaches and awful aesthetic choices, and then you get to work. Once it’s tarted up, you can put it back on the market in the hopes of making back your cash. Alongside that runs the jobs list, where you go to people’s houses and tidy them up. This usually involves cleaning up an ungodly amount of dirt, then picking out wallpaper and furniture according to their wishes.
The jobs are where most of the enjoyment comes from for me. Walking into a run-down house with a mop and bucket and getting it all sorted out, then seeing the past vs. present pics at the end? Perfection. The cleaning does feel a little floaty at times, like you’re waving your mop vaguely near things, but it’s only part of the process. You then need to paint things and arrange the furniture. In extreme cases, we take a sledgehammer to the walls. House Flipper is one of those games where everyone’s finished product, even in the jobs, will look vastly different. I find it immensely satisfying. Well, everything up until the furniture at least, but that might be because of the dizzying amount of items available to buy.
That might be why I’ve never gotten on with the actual flipping side. You can buy houses to renovate, but I just get overwhelmed by the choices and stick with the same stuff each time. Still, I like it in principle but I feel like it needs an overall goal. A big debt to pay off, for example, a la Hardspace: Shipbreaker. As it is, after I rented out my first house and completed a batch of jobs, I had more money than I knew what to do with. Towards the end, things started to get a little repetitive. Especially in the houses where all you’re doing is changing the furniture in a handful of small rooms. It gets very up and down, enjoyment wise, but it did take quite a few hours for me to get to that point.
New Coat Of Paint
On the remastering side, there are a couple of things that make this version of House Flipper stand out. The first is the visuals. I wouldn’t say it’s a drastic upgrade (at least to my untrained eyes), but there’s no denying that everything looks brighter. The grass seems a lot more textured, too. It’s a general spruce up. There are also extra levels, and tools to play with. The most welcome addition is a UV torch that can highlight bits of dirt. This becomes very handy when your minimap is telling you there’s a patch of dirt but you just can’t see it. There are also new furniture items for the pile, too. If you’re the type that likes to plan out the ideal house, then you’ve got more things to play with.
There are a few additions that I have mixed feelings about. First is the map screen, which replaces the list of jobs. It’s handy as a way to combine all of the DLCs together (which are all included in the game), but I found it hard to remember what area corresponded to what DLC. One area is almost entirely off the screen too, though that might be a resolution issue. I’m also not sold on the narration before each job. It’s nice in a story titbit kind of way, but after a few jobs, they all start blurring together. You don’t really follow any central character, so by the end I was just skipping through them. Don’t need your life story, just what colour of paint you want for the walls.
Then there’s the stuff that I definitely do not like. They all stem from a central point: House Flipper Remastered Collection is very buggy at time of writing. This includes the lovely lighting, which only seems to be lovely half the time. It has a lot of the flickering and a ‘checkerboard’ look that I often see with upscaling, but it’s also practical stuff too. My UV light kept turning itself off, for instance, as did the light switches. There’s also a bizarre ghosting around the tools, which looks horrible. Performance is rough too, with long loading times and sudden stuttering. Then there’s strange occurrences, like needing to fix a roof that looked impeccable. Or the time I deleted a door and was unable to put it back, creating a spooky hidden room.
House Flipper Remastered Collection – One For The Newbies
Maybe this is my general distaste for ‘Remastering’ coming through, but I don’t really see the point of remastering House Flipper. If it was to bring it in-line with the sequel, then I could see a case. House Flipper 2 has much more enjoyable painting, for example. The original begins to grate after a while. That stuff, combined with the emphasis on assembling things (which the sequel lacked), would make for a great game. As it is, it’s just a coat of paint on something that looked, to me at least, perfectly fine already. This is more just a packaging of existing DLCs, with a couple of new toys added.
That makes it a difficult sell for existing players. Sinking another £42 to play basically the same game over again isn’t going to cut it. But approaching it from the view of a new player, I can see the benefit. The collection is cheaper than the original plus DLC, so you’re getting good value there. The sheer volume of DLC will keep you playing for many hours. If the strange graphical bugs and odd pieces of design don’t put you off then you’ll have weeks of content to get through. For everyone else, just bear in mind that this isn’t as much a ‘remastering’ as it is a new coat of paint. There’s probably a house flipping joke in there somewhere.
