House Flipper is a unique house renovation game by Polish Studio Empyrean and publisher Ultimate Games S.A. and has finally found its way to Nintendo’s flagship console, the Nintendo Switch. Released back in 2018 on PC, the title has been since then released on PS4, Xbox One, and now finally, Nintendo Switch. The game is now available on Nintendo Switch eShop for just $24.99. This is our review of the Nintendo Switch version of House Flipper in which we grab our gloves and renovate complete houses single-handedly on a daily basis.
House Flipper starts with you clearing out your very first office which is just a small and dirty room. You have your laptop with you and your bare hands with which you set up the foundation of your house renovation firm. You start small with easy to complete jobs such as cleaning and installing certain items in houses. These contracts come with silly stories such as your very first job is a house-cleaning job that has been ransacked by the owner’s ex. You keep playing the game and you keep getting some really humorous contracts down the road as well. As you progress in the main story, you will continue to unlock additional tools as well which will allow you to perform even more functions in the game.
You can also renovate and upgrade your own office along the way as well. The laptop and your tablet give you access to the shop which features an extremely huge collection of unique items that you can purchase and fit in your office and project houses. While normal furniture items or decorative items can be simply placed in the location where you want them, items such as fixtures and plumbing must be fitted in their proper locations. For fittings, you have to complete a small but easy mini-game that will allow you to fix the items and make them functional. This gives a really neat look and actually makes it feel like you are installing a heater or a radiator in the wall.
The shop gives you a wide variety of options to choose from for your projects. Certain projects clearly state what you need for the job but sometimes you have to get a little creative yourself with the items. This is where the game really shines. You have a large variety of home items, electronics, home furnishings, walls, décor, doors, and even floors to choose from. You can build new walls to separate rooms or destroy already built-walls to expand rooms or make new rooms according to the customer’s demands. All of this must only be done by your hands and your trusty tools that you unlock with in-game progression.
Each job and contract comes with two completion scenarios. You do not have to complete a task 100% to move on to the next one. When you’ve completed a task 70%, it means that the major work is complete and if you want to call it a day, you can however if you need the money, you can keep completing the task all the way to 100%. This will give you a much bigger payout at the end of the job. You can quit the contract before completing as well but you cannot earn anything in this way. I always made sure that I complete a contract 100% as the extra cash helped a lot in making my own office better.
You can also level up and earn Skill Points in the game. Every time you level up, you earn Skill Points that can be used in the menu to upgrade your Perks. Upgrading perks is vital because they will help you in various ways and come handy in the long run. These perks are of different categories and you can upgrade them for different bonuses such as cleaning, destruction, painting, negotiating, and much more. Each of these categories has further perks and you can upgrade them at your own will. Each upgrade will cost you one Skill Point and in the long-run, they are extremely useful as your building times are reduced, you become more efficient in painting and much more similar bonuses.
While House Flipper may not be a looker on the Nintendo Switch, it still features plenty of visual effects that surely look appealing in their own way. Everything comes with its own animation as you place down items and rotate them around or simply trash them. It still looks a lot better than plenty of other simulation titles on the platform and plays pretty well too. The port is extremely stable and there are no game-breaking bugs. However, in tight spaces, sometimes I felt that items would be too close to the screen which would make it a little hard to put them down on their exact location. Nintendo Switch version also comes with additional features utilizing Nintendo Switch’s full array of features such as Touchscreen, HD Rumble, and Gyroscopic controls.
House Flipper is a great addition to the ever-growing library of simulation games on Nintendo Switch and is a really good one as well. It is a very well ported title and offers hours and hours of fun. It might be singleplayer only but the tasks and jobs keep coming and when you’ve put at least 6, 7 hours into the game, you will have a steady budget to take on the biggest jobs in the game which is when the game starts to really shine with its numerous and diverse tasks sometimes requiring you to bring down entire houses and building them a fresh. It is a great game and can keep you entertained for hours on the go.
Final Verdict:
Despite its main release years ago, I never played House Flipper until now and I can say that it is one of the most unique building and renovating game that I have ever played. It offers so much realism that you can even change the currency to your local one to feel even more comfortable with the game. The jobs are varied and unique and some of them are absolute behemoths where you must renovate full-fledged houses on your own without any sort of help. This is a great simulation builder where you work your way from little crumbs to full-on premium bread. I really liked spending my time building and painting walls, buying new furniture, and throwing out the old one and transforming old, ruins into modern, top-of-the-line living accommodations. If you are a fan of house-decorating in real-life or just want a unique experience, House Flipper is a great game for you to purchase and play on your Nintendo Switch.
Final Score: 8.5/10
