Grab your toolbox, put on your construction helmet and grab the sledgehammer! With House Flipper 2, Frozen District brings the sequel to the renovation simulator that received a lot of attention thanks to YouTube and Twitch. We donned our boiler suits and spruced up the three new regions of the coastal town of Pinnacove!
We wake up in a room that is reminiscent of a teenager's room and the phone rings. Tom Marino is on the line. We don't know who he is, but he seems to have known us for several years. From him we learn the basic situation: We returned to our homeland to find work. Tom sends us a few initial orders and our career as house flippers can begin.
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Inheriting well is half the battle
While we started with a minimalist shack in the first part, we have a starting bonus in the sequel. Our parents left us their old house before moving to Moonrise Bay. We don't know much about them because they only left us a few notes with clues, but they seem to fit pretty well into the afternoon programming of some private channels. There are broken pieces and rubbish everywhere, dead plants are piled up in the house and the kitchen screams of student accommodation.
But let's not complain. After all, the hut is an ideal support for our first attempts at walking and a good opportunity to collect our first experience points. But more on that later.
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Our goal now is to make money. That's why we collect orders. The order menu can be accessed as usual via the computer or alternatively anywhere at the touch of a button. The main menu is initially clearer than in its predecessor and shows right from the start how large the landscape in the area is. Over the course of the game we move from the suburbs to the beach and later into the forest. The areas don't look quite as generic as in the first film, but the real charm only emerges through the stories of our clients.
Source: Frozen District
We receive our orders via email. They are decorated with information that probably no roofer is interested in. From breakups, to Dungeons & Dragons evenings, to concerts in the garage, there's a lot there. The stories are nice, but in the end it's about cleaning up, painting, tearing down walls and so on.
Bessie the beaver accompanies us on our first steps. He tries to support us with hints, but especially in the first order we are overwhelmed because the rodent explains how the world is structured, but not what we have to do. And that even though we only have a few skills.
We can move furniture, pick up trash, clean up dirt and sell objects. But the game puts us in our place pretty quickly. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to sell our customers' entire interior and pocket the money. At least we can play basketball with the trash bags. The more we clean and tidy up, the higher our star rating is and the more money we get in the end. If you don't feel like going to this dirty place, you can simply stop after the first star.
We use the money we earn to buy new objects for our house and use the budget to shop for customers. Income and expenses are of course offset at the end. In our test, the budget was more of a minor issue than House Flipper 2 (buy now €44.99 ) Although it offers us extensive options for customizing our house, the stupid tidying up is more fun for us.
Only the assembly tasks, which are randomly thrown into the game, provide a welcome change. Almost like a mini-game, we screw a picture frame onto the wall. To do this, we first look for the material in the workshop and then holes, dowels and screws are put into the wall before the frame is hung up.
It's a bit of a shame that the mounting options of the predecessor were rigorously removed. Sanitary facilities could only be installed if the necessary connections were available. If that was the case, the sink, shower, etc. were laboriously installed. In House Flipper 2 this doesn't matter and the elements can be placed anywhere.