| Quick Verdict: Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator is good, not great. There are several elements implemented that keep it from rising to the top of the simulator/flipper game pile. Generally, it’s the tediousness of placing items and assembling while in a crowded space that really drags down the experience. |
| Game: | Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator |
| Developer(s): | Project Zima |
| Publisher: | Polden Publishing |
| Review Score: | 7 |
| Cozy Score: | 8 |
| Price: | $12.95 |
| Pros: | There’s no rushing, the voice acting is good, and there’s a roadmap for future content to expect. |
| Cons: | Some elements are tedious and become the bulk of the flipping experience, you can accidentally lock yourself in the bus since doors only open one way, and things start to feel extremely cluttered and claustrophobic when you start putting everything in. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Some elements are tedious and become the bulk of the flipping experience; you can accidentally lock yourself in the bus since doors only open one way, and things start to feel extremely cluttered and claustrophobic when you start putting everything in. |
Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator (henceforth simply Bus Flipper) is a perfect name because it’s a simulator about flipping and renovating buses. Ten out of ten – no notes on that front.
In Bus Flipper, you’ll be offered jobs to help others clean up and kit out their buses for extra money. When you’ve got a substantial amount, you can either upgrade your home or use it to buy a bus from an auction-type sale that you can fix up and flip for more money.
In my opinion, getting the emails from customers looking for their buses to get fixed up is the core game. It gives you missions and a template to follow that’s more in line with other flipping-style games. Whereas buying up buses to upgrade is more of a creative route since you’re only limited by your own imagination there.
Personally, I’m not great with designing, so I vastly prefer the core aspects of the game. However, if you enjoy getting creative, you have a few different bus types that you can play around with.
When you go out on a job with a client, you’ll have a checklist of things to complete that are fairly standard and then a few unique things thrown in. In the early stages, you’re looking more at picking up garbage and cleaning. But, as you progress, you’ll get into building partitions, laying floors and tiles, assembling furniture, and connecting plumbing and electricity.
While you’re on location, you may notice trash bags in the surrounding areas that can be thrown away for extra points or be able to find an extra “hidden” item for your own collections back at home. When I played the demo, the extra items seemed to be harder to find, whereas in the full release, most of them are out in the open.
Watch the trailer for Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator!
You won’t be able to paint things like the walls, but some of the furniture will have different swatches that you can choose from if you’d like to change up the look of something.
That’s the bulk of gameplay, so let’s talk about what I liked and then get into some of the pitfalls. I felt like the voice acting is great and certainly makes it unique. When you take a job, you have the option to drive and I thought it was a fun idea even though it’s just steering on an open road. I also liked that you have the ability to skip the driving. And, most of all, I love that they updated tiling.
My biggest qualm when playing the demo was that tiles were placed one click at a time and on a bus that requires hundreds of tiles, it was tedious. Now, you can just hold down the mouse button and it will lay the tile down while you move your cursor around.
Overall, I had a mostly positive experience playing Bus Flipper, but there are some pretty significant cracks in the foundation. As it sits, the game is kind of small; there are only a few buses and jobs that can be done. Luckily, we have access to the roadmap that ensures we’ll see more of both in the future.
When it comes to placing objects, you have to be mindful of several things. Firstly, you have to worry about door placement because they only open from one side. I managed to get myself locked into a bus because I put the door on wrong and had to use the ‘unstuck’ button in the main menu. Also, when putting items in a cabinet that isn’t assembled yet, you have to make sure you’re not blocking off areas that will need access.
404: Screw not found, please move the toilet paper and try again.
You can say that it makes sense to put down furniture, assemble, and then put down the items, but each item is automatically loaded once you put the previous one down. So, you kind of just get into a flow of placing everything.
Speaking of items, I found the number of them to be incredibly tedious. At one point on a bus, I had 134-ish items to place down and most of the furniture was in by 40 items. I’m torn on this because I love the fact that the tiny details were thought of, but it started feeling like an organizational game instead of a flipping one.
And, while we’re on the subject of tedium, assembly is kind of a nightmare. You can skip the assembly if you want, but you won’t get extra money. The problem that I have is that you end up putting together the same items. I had about 8 or 9 of the same item to assemble on a bus and it got monotonous by the time I hit the second one.
At some point, it felt like “Furniture Assembly: Placement Simulator”, which isn’t the game I was hoping for. Additionally, because you pop so many things into a space where most things have doors open, it can begin to feel cluttered and claustrophobic.
Lastly, when you boot up the game, it prompts control presets called ‘Original’ and ‘House Flipper’. It states that it’s for control type, but not that one preset is for a keyboard-based experience while the other is for a mouse-based experience. It works off the assumption that you already know which is which. I’ve played House Flipper and this game’s demo, but I’ve slept since then and could have used a reminder.
I chose original because I didn’t know and that gave me a more keyboard-based playing experience, whereas the House Flipper mode used the mouse to get to the wheel of items. Had I known, I would have picked the mouse-based options because they’re more intuitive to me.
Luckily, you can remap the keys in the control settings, but you can’t actually change modes. There’s no preset for you to pick if you would prefer one style over the other.
All in all, it’s decent as a flipper simulator, but it doesn’t wow. If you were interested in trying this game out, I’d recommend waiting for more of the roadmap to drop before diving in.
If you want to grab Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator, you can grab it on Steam for $12.95. Otherwise, you can check out some of my other reviews, like Catto’s Post Office or Tall Trails.
