Review: House Flipper Remastered Collection - Building Buildings

There's a lot to love here, but also some things that really aren't

Review copy provided by Frozen Way, thank you very much!

Yes, I know what's going through your head: "Oh come on, Roi is writing another review about some weird game that no one really wants to talk about." Well, you're basically right, and I'm fully aware of my problem with loving to talk about and play silly simulation games that I've written about several times on the site, whether in reviews or showcasing them in one of my traditional monthly game roundups. But still, even given this "shameful habit" of mine, it was hard for me to refuse the offer to check out House Flipper Remastered Collection.

The reason is pretty clear: I really love the original game in this series, and even though I didn't get to experience the franchise's sequel, House Flipper 2 from 2023, in depth, the original game holds a special place in my heart mainly because it was there for me during one of those dark periods we all have in life—in my case, it was at the height of my military service as a Border Guard fighter, when the game served as my calming escape on weekends at home or between shifts, thanks to the fact that it ran great on the laptop I had at the time. So does the remastered version of one of my favorite simulation games deliver the goods? Here's everything I thought about the game!

Bob the Builder, Can He Fix It?

House Flipper is basically a casual simulator game where we take on the task of renovating buildings with the goal of selling them for profit. The game lets us renovate a different building each time, where the renovation work includes, among other things, the need to clean the building of dirt as well as everything related to its renovation: from building new walls, purchasing furniture and placing it throughout the building, and more. As mentioned, the more we renovate the house according to the various tasks and redesign it, the more we raise its value to a level that will ultimately allow us to put it up for sale and hopefully sell it for profit. Additionally, the game includes a huge game map from which we can go out on dedicated missions in other people's buildings, where here too everything we do will be to renovate buildings and improve them.

House Flipper's gameplay loop was and remains in my eyes not bad at all, but unfortunately it seems age has taken its toll and I think the control and handling experience in the game feels much less comfortable than how I remembered it when I played the game originally. Don't get me wrong, the game lets you do tons of things and relatively easily, but personally I found myself getting lost in the game's various menus quite a bit, and interestingly the game's built-in tutorials didn't really help me navigate either. On the other hand, it's great to see and understand the amount of options available to us at any given moment during the game—I really loved that the game takes into account every action you could ever think of when it comes to designing homes, and that the vast majority of them can be performed by switching between dedicated tools at our disposal via a convenient tool wheel that will allow us to switch between them easily.

Renovating the Renovation, and Also a Bit Broken

The remaster version of House Flipper brings to the forefront several innovations, and the biggest one in my opinion is the fact that this version includes all the content expansions that were released for the original game over the years. Similar to other simulation games in this style (a great example would be the excellent Powerwash Simulator), House Flipper also had various expansion packs released over the years, from a pack that added the ability to cultivate and renovate gardens to an expansion pack that added pets to the game. All the content packs that the original game included come as part of the Remastered Collection, which is definitely very nice if you're like me and loved the original game very much but didn't necessarily get to experience its expansion packs.

Another upgrade to the remaster version is the fact that the game itself was renovated with a new layer of graphics and various UI changes that are supposed to make the experience better and prettier, but in practice I didn't feel a huge difference in the game's graphical quality compared to the original, and personally as I already mentioned earlier, a large part of the game's menus still felt relatively cluttered to me, so here too we're not talking about an unprecedented development. What I did like to see is that the game received full voice acting for a significant portion of its content, so encounters with various characters and their stories feel much more interesting and personal now—very nice. The remaster version will also provide us with six additional new missions that weren't part of the original game, alongside the addition of over 800 new objects you can use. At the same time and to my great regret, a very big Achilles heel I have with this game's remaster version is the fact that its optimization work for PC is simply lacking, as I experienced quite a few times unclear frame drops, freezes, and even crashes in rarer cases—it's not really clear to me what went wrong here, but from checking I did it seems I'm not the only player having this problem, so I assume it's something we can only hope the developer will fix down the road.

The Bottom Line

Look, games like this are relatively easy to review because ultimately we're talking about a circular and fairly straightforward experience. As far as the technical side of things goes, there's no question that ultimately this is the definitive version of House Flipper, mainly thanks to the fact that it includes all the expansion packs of the original game at a much more attractive price than what you would have had to pay if you were purchasing them as separate add-ons. In the same breath, the optimization could have been much better. Therefore, if you've already played the original game, this isn't necessarily an upgrade that justifies itself unless you really want to try the game's expansion packs and didn't purchase them before.