House Flipper is a unique chance to become a one-man renovation crew.
Buy, repair and remodel devastated houses.
Give them a second life and sell them at a profit!

Players start from humble beginnings in House Flipper, performing simple cleaning jobs for clients to earn cash for their first home purchase. These missions serve double duty as a lengthy tutorial, and the sense of progression is handled nicely; not only do you gradually acquire the different tools you’ll be using to improve homes, you also start unlocking a variety of quirky perks, like consuming less paint or the ability to identify dirt on your mini-map.

House Flipper gives you the ability to perform a number of remodeling actions, but the actual gameplay mechanics aren’t very interesting. Cleaning boils down to clicking on boxes and other litter to make it instantly vanish, or holding in the mouse button to wave your broom in the general vicinity of stains. The mechanics for painting, tiling, and mounting appliances are equally simplistic, and don’t leave much room for creativity. You have a little more freedom when it comes to demolishing and building walls and placing furnishings, but you won’t be impressing Chip and Joanna Gaines anytime soon.

After you’ve saved up enough money, you can forgo the set jobs and buy your own fixer-upper on the open market. The houses come in a variety of different sizes, prices, and levels of disrepair. After following the lengthy to-do lists of your previous employers, having the ability to do whatever you please with your new home is exciting. However, it doesn’t take long to realize your renovation options are less expansive than they first appear.

I’m not the biggest remodeling show fan, but thanks to my wife’s obsession with HGTV, I’ve watched enough of them to understand the appeal, and House Flipper simply lacks the flexibility to deliver on the dream. Despite the real-world emphasis on curb appeal when it comes to selling homes, you can’t perform any landscaping or outdoor improvements to your houses aside from applying a new coat of paint. You also can’t add or remove windows, or alter outside walls in any way. The demolition mechanics are limited inside as well; you can’t tear down or move any wall that has plumbing fittings, so your bathroom layouts are bound to stay static – unless you want a toilet in your kitchen. These restrictions put major renovations out of the realm of possibility and make the whole experience feel shallow.

Even if you’re happy with your home’s floorplan, touching up rooms lacks flexibility. Paint is applied one full-length, vertical strip at a time, preventing you from doing any kind of creative treatment aside from big-top circus stripes. Your color options are also underwhelming, and you can’t mix your own custom hues.

While House Flipper technically boasts hundreds of unique objects that you can place in your homes, drilling down into specific categories sometimes offers depressingly few options. You quickly get tired of placing the same doors, desks, and (one!) shower in all of your homes. Putting up shelves often left me at a loss for what to fill them with, and I found myself gravitating to the same few candles and plants to make rooms feel less barren.

While House Flipper’s tools are serviceable, you won’t be able to truly design your dream home, or incorporate your own creative flourishes beyond the ability to add custom paintings (which I had way too much fun with). This limited creativity isn’t a deal-breaker, but it results in generic homes, which makes the renovation process feel repetitive.