House Flipper 2 Review: Much More Flip Than Flop

The other day, I was out on a run through my neighborhood. The sun was just starting to set, so I was hoping to use all of the Christmas lights turning on to distract me from how much I hate running. As I went past a house that had a giant display of reindeer on its roof, I noticed something else up there. My neighbors had a large spot of dirt on some of their side paneling. Most people would probably see this and immediately move on. Maybe you'd alert them, trying to be the good, if a bit nosey, neighbor on the block. For me, my first thought was, "Well, I need to switch to my cleaning tool and get rid of that before I can finish this flip." That's the hold that House Flipper 2 has had on me over the last week. It's not only infecting my dreams with its soothing music, but I'm now thinking about cleaning a neighbor's house because of this game.

House Flipper 2 Makes Intuitive Changes to Your Toolbelt

With this sequel, developer Frozen District has improved almost every aspect of the original House Flipper. Every tool in your belt feels snappier. Painting is more intuitive, making it feel more true-to-life, including the "ability" to paint over trim after you've unlocked free-form painting. Walls go up and down much faster, letting you re-shape a house to your heart's content with much less needless busy work. Heck, House Flipper 2, despite looking and playing better, loads much more quickly than the original. You're still not getting into levels as quickly as other simulation games of this ilk, but it's smoother in almost every regard.

Frozen District has also made the smart decision to break assembling appliances out into its own mini-game. You're no longer stopping down to connect wires each time you want to install an air conditioner. Instead, you can work your way through several stand-alone sidequests where you're putting together furniture and appliances under a time constraint. If you do it under the limit, you'll get cheaper prices when you purchase that type of object in the future. Or, if you're like me and don't care, you can skip that part of the game entirely and not miss much.

On top of that, House Flipper 2 takes a page from games like PowerWash Simulator to give the world some extra story beats. It's nothing as grandiose as an RPG, but there's a central narrative that keeps things churned and several fun bits of interactive story-telling, especially when you dig into the houses you can fully flip. Unfortunately, this is one of the places where PowerWash Simulator moved the genre forward, and while House Flipper 2 makes a solid go of it, the developers aren't having nearly as much fun with the story compared to FuturLab.

House Flipper 2 Could Use More Personality

It's also worth noting that House Flipper 2 can be a bit finicky at times. For example, there was a point where I was trying to clean a spot on a ceiling, but using the rag tool on the spot didn't do anything. Instead, I had to move my cursor over a clean window near the spot on the ceiling to get it to go away. It's nothing major, but it can get frustrating if you're trying to completely clean a house before moving into the remodel phase.

I'd also like to see the personality of the citizens of Pinnacove extend to house flipping. What I mean is that each time you flip a house, you don't have any idea of what buyers want. It'd be nice to have something showing you what's doing well on the market, so you could stage your house to meet demands. Instead, I ended up doing the renovations and then not actually putting in furniture. Sure, I make less money, but you make more than enough to buy even more of the more expensive flips without putting in that extra time.

But those are relatively small potatoes compared to the improvements House Flipper 2 brings to the table. And, the game has the potential to become even better once it's in players' hands because of the new Sandbox Mode. In pre-release form, it's a bit bare, but when players jump in and start creating their own houses, there will be all kinds of new places to fix up. The original House Flipper received a ton of DLC content over the years, but this Sandbox Mode could give players nearly limitless options of new houses to flip. That's an exciting, yet terrifying prospect, as I worry that all of my free time is about to be taken over by yet another great simulation house-flipping game from Frozen District.

Rating: 4 out of 5

House Flipper 2 launches on December 14 for PC. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S version is scheduled for March 21, 2024. A review copy was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and the game was experienced on a PC.