The Repair House Review: Fixer Upper

Made by the original creator of PC Building Simulator, Claudiu Kiss – The Repair House is an object restoration sim where you run your own independent restoration business and tend to the endless requests of your customers, that can’t do so much as use a screwdriver.

Starting modestly in your barren workspace with nothing more than a workbench, a phone (rotary, I hasten to add), and some notebooks. There’s a lot of laborious work to do in order to earn the big bucks.

Early stage gameplay consists of nothing other that accepting orders from the phone, ordering parts, waiting for the delivery, and fixing the item in question. In order to replace the part, you simply click on a part before it miraculously unscrews itself las though animated by some kind of ghostly force. Follow this through until you reach the piece that needs replacing and then put it back together. It is surprisingly simple – until you put a piece in before another particular piece and then you have to take it apart again. This occurs a lot more often than I would care to admit.

This process seems like the epitome of mundane in the early stages and you never once so much as see a customer face to face – although in this day and age, some might argue that that’s a good thing.

The payout from repairing these belongings is not especially fruitful, and you find yourself laboriously doing the same kind of orders over and over again to try and scrape enough for the new tools – that’s if rent day doesn’t sneak up on you, suddenly losing all your hard worked earnings in one fell swoop.

From level 10, you are given secondary objectives which set out certain conditions that must be met for the order to be completed. Dictating that you must only use parts that are of perfect quality, or that the paint finish must be the same exact shade of Rosso Corsa as a Ferrari straight off the forecourt.

These secondary objectives are both a blessing and a curse. I was so grateful when there was finally another goal to meet but there was one particular glitch that kept tripping me up. As you can see from the picture below, the secondary objective stated that the condition of parts used should be in perfect condition. “Fair enough”, I thought to myself – If I’m going to replace a part for a customer then I would expect it to be in perfect condition.

However, after replacing the part, the secondary objective still shows that it’s not completed, which, if you’re a complete doofus like me and didn’t realise initially, you then end up blowing my budget repairing the entire item to perfect condition – just in case.

Okay, so it wasn’t game breaking by any stretch but without the ability to get a bank loan, money was tight and I ended up recycling everything in my inventory in order to raise some much needed cash. I was soon $153 richer and on a mission.

I went to the flea market to see if I could restore an item for a decent return. The Game Jam ES console set me back a mere $25.50 – Bargain. The remaining parts cost around $100 to source, before washing, sandblasting, and painting which cost another $115. Total outlay was a shocking $240.50 for an item that I later found out sold for $172.65. Bargain Hunting did not work in my favour and the general consensus seems to be similar.

At level 20, garages occasionally spring up on the map. These garage give you the ability to peruse a person’s belongings and make offers on the items you want to keep, to either restore or use for parts. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like they really added much to the gameplay. This is mostly due to the fact that the economy in The Repair House just doesn’t seem to work as well as it should.

The Repair House overall thoughts

The Repair House offers players a relatively chill experience in repairing a large variety of items, whether it be toys, machinery, or technology. Painting and sandblasting is an enjoyable experience, as is the repairing itself. Unfortunately, the overall shopping experience using the notebooks leaves a lot to be desired and the in game economy really doesn’t do itself any favours, either. The Repair House would do well to check itself in for refurbishment.

Check out The Repair House on Steam here. You can also read more of our games reviews here.