Frozen District give players a taste of what House Flipper 2 will be like when it is finally released.
House Flipper 2 is the long-awaited sequel to House Flipper. Frozen District developed the game. Although House Flipper 2 isn’t the only game under development currently by the Frozen District Team. HoneyComb, a Survival Sandbox, will be released in Q1 2024. Frozen District first announced that House Flipper 2 was in development during a ‘2 FOR U’ live stream in February 2022. The Publishers Playway S.A. is a Polish publishing company with quite a few popular titles—games such as Thief Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator, and Discovery Gold Rush.
The game is noted to be a ground-up rebuild of House Flipper with a lot of brand-new mechanics to play around with, as well as new graphics and art style. Earlier this year, it was announced that House Flipper 2 would be released during Q3 2023. House Flipper 2 starts with a small beach house for you to restore. You get a phone call from Tom Marino, who has found the house for you to flip
Much like some of the later jobs in House Flipper, you will have a budget to keep an eye on. As this is the demo, you have quite a large budget to work with for the house. Unlike the progress bar in House Flipper, every task you complete for a job fills up three stars. This makes completing a job early or just stopping halfway more possible. As in the first game, you needed to get a max of 90% of the tasks done before you could complete them earlier.
Besides the house you can renovate, there are a few hidden secrets, such as a small basement room hidden near the right beach on the property. The door features a strange black handprint that hints at a different game. Once you can get the door open, you will find what looks like a Dungeons and Dragons gameboard with three chairs. Unfortunately, you cannot sell anything in this room, but you can change the designs of the chair, table, and standing lamp.
While many tools are similar to the first game in House Flipper 2, all their mechanics work differently. Now, instead of just picking up trash and it disappearing, you have a trash bag that gets filled to a certain limit before you have to throw it away. When cleaning up stains or dirt, you won’t be able to use the same mop from House Flipper. Instead, you now have a spray bottle and a cloth to clean up. Just using the cloth is a slow process, so when you make use of both the cloth and the cleaner in the spray bottle, it makes cleaning up quicker.
These aren’t the only tools to have changed; paneling and painting have changed as well. Both now allow you to deal with a small block or tile, allowing you to really customize what you are doing, such as creating a backsplash in the kitchen or creating a feature wall using different shades of paint. However, by just painting without creating a border, you may run over areas you don’t wish to paint. Luckily, when it comes to tiles, panels, and paint you can create a border for when the paint stops or for how big you wish for the backsplash to be.
Out of all the tools available for you to use, the flipper tool may be the most invaluable. For example, let’s say you place an item or piece of furniture down that doesn’t match with what you envisioned the interior color of your design would be. There is a mode that allows you to change the design of the piece of furniture. The flipper tool also allows you to duplicate an item and copy the style of an item onto a different item, such as coloring and choice of wood or metal, if applicable.
Although it is disappointing to lose the minimap where you are able to track all the dirt that needs to be cleaned up and the layout of the rooms, this does make tracking all small pieces of dirt a little harder, but it isn’t highly noticeable once you get sucked into the game. As with the first game, House Flipper 2 features a dynamic day-night cycle, although in the demo, it does not seem to have the same settings, so you can set the day-night cycle to real-time rather than the in-game time.
In terms of graphics, there is a huge difference when compared to the first game. Not only are the graphics higher, but everything has had a lot of effort put into it to create a smooth gameplay experience. As well as a rework to the appearance of the many tools. Even the tablet where you buy items from the store and check on tasks has received an upgrade.
The sound engineering is well done and makes House Flipper 2 feel a little like the first game with nostalgic music and new background sound effects. The menu music seems like a remix of the original House Flipper main track. The voice acting done for the character Tom Marino is really well done and manages to get the character’s emotions across. Hopefully, more jobs in House Flipper 2 will contain voice acting as well.
Overall, while House Flipper 2 is a ground-up rebuild of the first game, it brings in a lot of new mechanics and even reinvents some older concepts that many fans have been asking for. It shows how far the Frozen District team has come in terms of the House Flipper development and how much they care for the House Flipper Series.
