House Flipper 2 Review (PS5) – Tapping into the simple pleasures of just cleaning and organising things, House Flipper 2 is a foray into the cozy house management genre that stands as a fully-featured sequel to the original game. A bevvy of features has been added to this new iteration to make House Flipper 2 feel like a worthwhile investment for players who are familiar with the house building of the original game.
Despite the clear ambition and care that has gone into the content of the game itself, House Flipper 2 struggles from being railroaded to the DualSense controller, which makes what should be a relatively relaxing experience into one that caused far more irritation than I would have liked, especially in a game all about building your perfect home.
House Flipper 2 Review (PS5) – Spring Cleaning
Getting Your Hands Dirty
As the name suggests, House Flipper 2 is quite literally about flipping houses for money. You play as one of two different characters down to your preference and you accept various requests to come and complete household tasks for clients. These tasks can range from repairing and cleaning a house after a raccoon attack or unpacking boxes for someone who has just moved into the neighbourhood.
Each job that you complete has a unique NPC associated with them and you’re given the chance to get to know them through brief phone calls and exchanges. While these were hardly anything too compelling in the grand scheme of things, it did help to add a bit of personality to the houses that you clean, rather than keeping things clinical. I particularly enjoyed some of the embarrassed comments from homeowners as you see how messy their homes are.
For an experience that quite literally is busy work, having comedic elements to prop them up helps to cut through some of the inherent tedium of the tasks being completed. This is aided by a generally pleasant aesthetic and soundtrack that also helps to give a nice ambience to the houses that you ‘explore.’ It also helps that House Flipper 2 manages to achieve a large satisfaction out of presenting some really grimy houses against the success of cleaning out all of the mess.
On The Job
House Flipper 2 follows a relatively standard structure of moving from house to house and accepting various requests from a variety of clients. Once you arrive at your destination, you make use of a gradually expanding wheel of tools in order to fill the demands of the client and earn some money for your hard work. While your repertoire of tools begins as a fairly small selection, this steadily unfolds from general housekeeping to renovating walls and being given more freedom.
Jobs at the start of the game kick off by asking you to clean walls and clear up trash from houses, making use of window cleaners, scrubbers and rubbish bags to satisfyingly organise the chaos of a household. Before long, you’re selling, vacuuming and re-organising furniture to a client’s specifications. There is a great amount of variety in the activities that you undertake throughout the experience and I appreciated the new tools I was being given on a regular basis.
This is aided by a robust upgrade system that rewards you generously based on the tools that you make use of throughout your various jobs. These upgrades open up new options and allow for more efficient clearing of your various jobs These help to open new options for you to explore and are free to reassign as you see fit depending on your current job. Increasing the capacity of bin bags or giving you access to a cleaning spray to make cleaning stains far easier among others are great benefits that steadily unlock throughout the experience.
Despite this variety being commendable, I found myself coming up against obstacles that I felt were somewhat unintended during my time on the job. While I found that I was able to generally complete objectives with very little resistance, I did sometimes find that my tools went against me and I spent a few good minutes gawking at a room, confused where the last stain or piece of rubbish was.
There is a built-in “flipper-sense” that highlights relevant objects in a room relating to your objectives, I found that this was inconsistent in how effective it was and that some items seemed to go quite literally under the radar. Succeeding in a job never comes down to perfecting a house, but there’s nothing more irritating to me than knowing that I’m possibly walking over the single piece of rubbish that I needed to get rid of. Mileage will vary with this gripe as some might not be interested in totally clearing a house but, if you’re going to do a good job, you may as well do it well.
Free Reign to Create
The most significant inclusion with this sequel is the sandbox mode that’s accessible from the first time that you boot up the game. For players who have enjoyed the original game, this mode presents complete and total free reign to create your own properties with a staggering amount of customisation options. From building walls and every option available in the base game, to terraforming your foundations, it’s seriously impressive stuff.
To be honest, for some it might be a bit too impressive as I found myself quickly becoming overwhelmed with my options and feeling like I was doing things wrong. For those who are inclined to create their own levels in games and want to flex their creativity, this is absolutely the mode for you, with a learning curve included.
Online level sharing is also facilitated, with people being able to share their creations to their friends and the public following release so I look forward to seeing what creative properties people are going to create with the suite of options that are built into the game.
Growing Pains
All of the above points are worth of high praise as a significant improvement over the original game. But House Flipper 2 struggles to hide its roots as a PC game first and foremost. The jump from keyboard and mouse controls to the DualSense isn’t as elegant as I would have liked. While I enjoy the detail-focused gameplay in reorganising furniture and decorations, I found myself having to regularly wrestle against an unintuitive control scheme that seemed to want to stop me.
I enjoy being asked to organise living spaces – maybe that speaks to me as a person but the satisfaction of sorting out messes is a relaxing experience. And so I found myself really disappointed when I was forced to cooperate with a system that was fighting me with a good deal of the time. And this is what clued me into the game not particularly caring if you make a mess.
I initially put time and care into putting items away in drawers and making sure everything made sense, but once I found my frustration winning over, I just began to drop things anywhere and that feels like a paradox. Yes, I’m unboxing items, but I’m doing it for the sake of completing objectives, rather than for the fun of it. It’s such a shame that these control issues managed to impact my experience overall.
Similarly, this impacted my enjoyment of the sandbox mode, with problems that I imagine simply wouldn’t have existed with a keyboard and mouse. The minutia of terraforming the ground and constructing walls starts to feel like literal work as I force myself to precisely move my camera when I feel like the small movements required just aren’t that intuitive.
There’s a wonderful game buried under this muddled control scheme and with a keyboard and mouse, House Flipper 2 becomes a brilliant relaxing time that channels the very best of the genre. Ambitious customisation and great additions make this a worthy sequel to a well-known indie darling. Unfortunately, the experience simply hasn’t been properly optimised for console players.
House Flipper 2 is now available for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.