House Flipper (Switch) review: DIY made easy

I’ve tried my hand at DIY a few times. Some attempts have been somewhat successful, but usually, it’s a disaster and gets left half-finished. Luckily, that’s not the case when playing House Flipper on the Nintendo Switch. I can finally carry out all the tasks I want without shocking myself, causing a leak or having to spend any of my actual money.

The idea of House Flipper is quite similar to The Sims, if you’re my other half anyway. She loves to build properties, do them up and move on to the next. The main difference here is you have no need to raise a family, go to school or head out to work. That’s because flipping houses is your job.

You start out in a small building that you use as your office. It doesn’t look that great and you can’t quite fix all the problems right away. That’s because you have to go out to learn some skills by completing jobs. But what’s that got to do with flipping houses you say? Well, unless you’re privileged, you have to work for your money and House Flipper is no different. You have a small lump sum to start off with, but you’ll need extra money to purchase furniture, paint, etc.

It’s actually a really great way to introduce you to some of the skills you can operate in House Flipper. Jobs will fly in by email and you can pick and choose what you do. It might be someone needs their new house cleared up of rubbish and given a fresh coat of paint. They may need a room split in two due to a new sprog on the way. Or, it could just be that they need some electircal or plumbing work done. There are a whole variety of jobs to do.

The way you complete the jobs is unbelievably easy. You just select the tools you need and hold down a button stated on the screen. Much easier than doing DIY in real life. If only it were this easy normally, I’d have a lovely finished house. When it comes to assembling stuff, it’s still simple, you’ll just hold a combination of buttons in order, one will screw something in, another will allow you to grab the wire, and so on. I think it would be better though to have a timer, that can cause issues if you don’t complete before time runs out. Otherwise, you have as much time as you need to finish them off.

The more you complete jobs in House Flipper, you’ll unlock skill bonuses. These allow you to paint bigger patches of the wall at once, assemble certain things faster, and increase your earnings. You can pick and choose what to spend your points on, but a quick tip, increasing your earnings is definitely worthwhile. Some jobs take you no time at all and you can easily bag a few grand for quickly painting a house. How much you complete a job as well will affect how much you earn for completing it.

Normally, you can get away with doing about 75%, but I tried not to replicate how I operate in real life into House Flipper. To help you, on the right-hand side, you get a progress bar to show how much you’ve done, and it also flashes up to say what needs doing in case you forget what the email said. The issue here is, sometimes the tasks are so long you don’t quite see what the whole thing says. And with no goals tab to pop up, and no way of expanding that tasks list, you sometimes have to guess what it is you’re doing.

To help you a little bit, House Flipper does have a minimap and it will show things like faulty sockets or places where you need to install equipment like radiators. And your skills can be upgraded to show more stuff like dirt. Really handy because sometimes when cleaning, it’ll say you’ve missed a spot when you’ve cleaned it, but may not have actually just held your mop there quite long enough. Another small bug that can be quite the annoyance.

Once you have the hang of everything in House Flipper, you can proceed on to buying houses, renovating them and selling them on for profit. The way it works is that you put the house to auction and people bid on it. To help you, when renovating you’ll see comments on the left side of the screen that says if what you’re doing is to their liking. The more you do that they like, the higher they will bid and the more money you’ll make.

These comments are stored on your laptop and tablet, and you can buy a house and renovate it according to someone’s specific requirements. Easier to do the further you progress in the game as you collect more comments. And, again, if you upgrade the right skills, despite someone winning the auction, you can then negotiate the price with the winner, to try and get some more money out of them.

One problem I did have when renovating in House Flipper though, was in some smaller houses, I tried knocking walls down to meet the demands of some people who wanted fewer rooms. Seemed to work well enough when I was on my jobs. But for some reason, didn’t quite work the same during renovations. The floor where the wall stood couldn’t be covered in some properties and just looked a mess. Not something a rug couldn’t cover, but still, not ideal. And on top of that, walking into my new larger room, still showed as two small ones on the mini-map and task list.

The last bit to touch upon is probably the store that you go to, to purchase things in House Flipper. It has quite a lot to choose from. Various paints, wall panels, furniture and more. And it is all well organised, except the other section that I’d say could’ve had some things under the decoration section instead like wall clocks. Most stuff can be customised too, so you can get your bookcase to match your bed and so on. It’d be nice to see if more stuff is released in future updates, as some things can be a little more restrictive, like having only one standing shower to choose from.

In terms of House Flipper’s visuals, they were by no mean amazing, but they were more than acceptable. The houses look pretty standard, and I enjoyed how some pieces were actually out of reach and so you’d have to buy scaffolding to climb and reach them. Small details like that were actually really impressive. The audio was quite good too, sound effects were minimal really, and made generic noises. But the background music was relaxing, and perfectly matched the game’s feel. Although I’d usually just ask Alexa to stick something on in the background instead.

House Flipper overall thoughts

Despite some of the annoyances, which were all minor and could be resolved in some way or another, I thoroughly enjoyed House Flipper. I’ve spent far too much time on this title, sometimes not even realising I was just sat there for 2 hours renovating a single house. You’d never catch me doing that in real life. With a few renovations itself, and cleaning up the bugs or at least introducing some small features, I’d say this is a must buy. As it is though, I’d say it’s definitely enjoyable, and great to pass the time too, but still needs a little work.

House Flipper on Nintendo Switch was developed and published by Ultimate Games S.A. and is available now on the Nintendo eStore. House Flipper was originally developed by Empyrean, and that version is available on Steam. Whilst you wait for your game to download if you do like the look of it, why not check out some of our other game reviews HERE.