House Flipper 2 Review – Fixing up the Fixer-Uppers

One hot summer in Mesa, Arizona, my grandfather hired me to work on his home, like in House Flipper 2, where I was paid $50 for an entire summer of painting, mixing cement, and filling holes in the property’s backyard. About ten years later, I returned to the same property and did some light construction work in hopes of putting it on the real estate market. There was something undeniably special about renovating that old, run-down property, and doing so came with a special feeling of accomplishment I haven’t quite recaptured since.

House Flipper 2 seeks to recapture that feeling in a game full of painting, furnishing, and flipping old properties. While nothing compares to the real thing, I quickly found hours slipping by as I played this captivating simulator. Don’t tell my editor, but playing House Flipper 2 had me fantasizing about a career change as I built and sold virtual dream homes I would do anything to live in myself.

House Flipper 2’s career mode – which is by far more rewarding and engaging game mode than Sandbox – begins in your shabby, run-down family home, where you take a phone call from a local realtor. As he explains over the phone, the town you’re in has a famously ugly home that you’re dying to remodel. Unfortunately, you must get the city’s permission to do so, and you must first prove yourself as an accomplished local flipper. Having this goal of an ‘ultimate flip’ is an interesting way to add a story and feeling of progression to a game that could otherwise just be about going door to door redecorating with no stakes or end game in sight.

Before you get to actually flip any houses, you’ll be taking on odd jobs as a house cleaner and redecorator. These jobs are great ways to build up cash and remain even as you start buying homes, so you’ll never find yourself bankrupt by a project. They also allow you to learn all of the different tools available, but the progression at which you unlock everything is a bit slow for my taste.

I must have been five hours and ten-plus jobs into the game before I unlocked the ability to build and demolish walls. For reference, I had already purchased my first property, which was lousy with gap-filled walls, before I got the side mission that unlocked the ability to fill them. This felt like an unnecessarily long wait for a mechanic that took me about two seconds to learn once I had access to it.

Flipping homes is where the game starts to take off, which is good because it has “house flipper” in the title. In the aforementioned side jobs, you’re guided every step of the way. From the amount of trash and stains that need to be cleaned up to the exact furniture that needs to be installed, customers have an idea of what they want to do to their property. You’re given little, if any, flexibility or freedom in doing so.

Once you buy your own fixer-upper, how you go about fixing it is up to you, and all of the guidance is gone. At this stage, you can freely build or tear down walls, panel walls, or floors as you see fit. You can tear out doorways and windows, and leave as much garbage around the property as you’d like. Meticulously cleaning up all of the trash at each home I visited made me realize that I put much more care into the cleanup in this game than in my real-world apartment.

My first flip turned a graffiti-covered one-bedroom one-bath into a nice one-bedroom two-bath, which, in hindsight, I remember I forgot to install a shower in. I guess that makes it a one-bedroom, two-toilet? Regardless, I spent about 71,000 coins (not dollars, apparently) on my renovation and netted a profit of about 6,700. Not bad at all for a home with no shower, if you ask me.

House Flipper 2 is a relaxing simulator with interesting mechanics that is overall very fun. While they can get a bit repetitive, I played the game in much longer sessions than expected before needing to take a break.

Said mechanics include picking up trash, scrubbing stains, selling and placing furniture, placing wallpaper, tiles, and panels, tearing down and building walls, painting, and even some light electrical wiring. Each mechanic has a small perk tree that improves as you use them and more or less functions as little mini-games on their own. For the most part, these mini-games are fun, with a few mildly frustrating exceptions.

Particularly, I found painting walls and scrubbing windows to be a pain. Cleaning windows is its own mini-game where your cursor is replaced with one of those window scrubbing devices, which has pretty poor tracking and doesn’t always clean everything you drag over. If you’re cleaning a particularly small window, the edges of the window frame can get in the way of your mouse tracking and make it an even more difficult task.

Painting also was a bit of a frustrating task, with better but still not perfect mouse tracking. What was particularly annoying about painting walls was setting up the area to paint, which requires you to click and drag over an area of the wall you want to be paintable. The selection would often break before I could cover the whole area I wanted, meaning I had to start the selection process over again and paint large walls in small batches.

These buggy mechanics were frustrating enough that I groaned a bit when I had to take the tools out, but they weren’t frustrating enough to make me want to shut the game off. The writing and spoken dialogue in the game weren’t great either, but they were such rare occurrences that they hardly were worth mentioning. While not perfect, House Flipper 2’s flaws hardly hold it back, and it remains a fun, relaxing simulation of a uniquely exciting fantasy.

Nice Witcher reference, by the way.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! House Flipper 2 is available on Steam.