Garden Flipper Review
A worthwhile, green-fingered addition.
Some say that all games are power fantasies. The power to save the world. The power to travel through time. The power to win the race. House Flipper offered perhaps the most absurd power fantasy of all: the power to purchase several houses for less than £100,000 in 2018.
That game focused on the renovation and reselling of various suburban properties, with the ultimate aim of making as much cash as physically possible. Cleaning, painting, tiling, plastering and interior design were key skills to master along the way. Garden Flipper, the game’s first paid DLC, lets you take those same skills outdoors.
The DLC inserts itself into the game in two ways. There are now gardening contracts, similar to the renovation contracts already available. These are pleasingly varied, ranging from a simple mow ‘n’ weed or resurfacing up to the construction of an outdoor gym or kids playground. These contracts allow you to rake in some extra cash and are designed to show off the level of customisation available, giving you plenty of ideas when it comes time to design your own garden from scratch.
Gardening contracts do suffer from the exact same problems as those in the base game, however. There’s no way to find out what you’re going to be paid before accepting a job, nor which tools you’ll need to use. Items that need to be purchased are listed only once the previous one has been placed, making planning ahead tricky – especially when lots of the items have very similar names. The game also has no way of telling whether you’ve actually done a good job. You’ll get paid the exact same amount for the hours spent meticulously lining up pavement slabs and colour-coordinating the furniture as you will for just piling it all in the middle of the job zone and clocking off early.
You could do that, but you’d be missing the point. Garden Flipper, much like the base game, isn’t a Doritos and Mountain Dew sort of game. As with real gardening, I found that the best way to enjoy this is with a cup of tea, a few biscuits and a nice long podcast. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the furniture and other assets on offer are just as high quality as those available on the inside. The joy comes from stepping back at the end of a job and watching the sun set over the freshly-laid patio with outdoor dining space and a barbecue just itching to have a burger or two thrown onto it. The heat from the barbecue gently warming my…
No, hold on, that’s not a barbecue. It’d be remiss of me not to mention technical issues and, since enabling the Garden Flipper DLC, I have found that performance has suffered. What used to draw an easy 60FPS from my 1080ti now causes it to belch out heat like a dragon in some sort of non-specific fantasy medieval battle scenario. It still runs fine, but it’s a significant performance hit over the base game.
Other annoyances are more minor. Trees and fences are seemingly indestructible, somewhat ruining any grand concepts that might involve their removal. The placement of plants and grass are much fiddlier than the grid-based interior walls from the base game, meaning that it’s hard to get things exact and easy to leave tiny holes that require an entire additional roll of turf to fill. To its credit, Garden Flipper will let you get away with a few holes in the turf during contract missions. My brain won’t, but that’s my own personal issue.
Perhaps the biggest issue currently is that, however much work you put into a garden, very little of it is demonstrated in the final value of the house when it comes time to sell. Rather than directly adding to the potential purchase price, having a well-designed garden allows you to enter a gardening competition, with various categories depending on the type of garden you’ve gone for. Your performance allows you to increase the house value by a small percentage, but this seems almost insulting considering the amount of work that goes into fully decking out a garden.
Ultimately, as somebody new to both Flipper games, I find the interior design challenges of the base game to be more rewarding than the new gardening tasks. Perhaps I’m just not particularly green-thumbed. Despite this, now that I’ve got used to fixing up gardens as part of the house flipping process, I would certainly feel the loss were I to uninstall this DLC. There’s something about the contrast between before and after. I can almost imagine myself leaning on my shovel, adjusting my flat cap, nodding contentedly to myself and nipping inside for a nice hot cup of tea after a job well done.
Whether you’ll enjoy this or not depends on what kind of House Flipper-er you are. If you’re in it for the cash, making a quick profit and moving on, you’re unlikely to see much benefit from spending time in the garden. If, however, you enjoy the long game, taking your time and making each property the best it possibly can be, you’ll get just as much enjoyment from this as you did from the original.
[Reviewed on PC]