Review / REAL ESTATE Simulator (PC)

They say that a good book should have hooked you by the end of the first few chapters. Basically, if you aren’t invested by then you’re probably going to be a really hard sell if you’re going to like it at all. I think this mentality applies to games too. This is one of the debates that annoys me when it comes down to reviewing. The argument that you can’t fairly judge a title without at the very least playing most of it doesn’t make sense to me. We call it a game loop for a reason. This being said, If you aren’t hooked in the first hour or so of play unless things change wildly, you won’t be hooked forty hours later. I don’t think every dev team gets this memo. Please bear this observation in mind as we approach today’s game. It’s REAL ESTATE Simulator, I’ve been playing it on PC and it’s … well it’s certainly a thing.

Bloody hell the early 2000s want their game back, and not in a good way. I don’t, (as is usually the case,) have any issues with the premise of REAL ESTATE Simulator. This is a Simulator, (obviously,) where you buy houses, upgrade them, and then sell them for a bigger profit. So a redecorating SIM with a payday. That would be fine if there was any semblance of fun involved. I played for a little over an hour and gave up. I’m a very forgiving player and I always give things the benefit of the doubt but my god I’ve had dental surgery more enjoyable than this.

The tutorial in REAL ESTATE Simulator, if you could call it that, makes you buy a sleeping bag and sends you off into the slums to buy a tent. You then place said sleeping apparatus in said tent and sell it for about $1000. I know that we’re in a housing crisis but you could buy a shed for less than $1000. When you’ve set this complete ripoff up, you go back to the office and put it onto the market. Then the entirely ridiculous bidding part of the game comes in when a string of people show up all wanting to move into your ludicrously priced tent. Some of these people will want a more expensive tent so they’ll be out, while others will tell you that they’re looking for something for a price that matches yours. You then go and finalize the deal and charge them exactly what they have agreed to pay for them to tell you it’s too expensive. Interspersed among the tent buyers are customers who are looking to pay several thousand dollars for much more expensive property that you’re nowhere near being able to afford. This means that you turn away a bunch of people who shouldn’t be there in the first place, for them to tell you your service is really bad. So, you’re insulting your customers by not giving them a level of service that’s impossible to achieve really early on.

When you’ve sold your first tent in REAL ESTATE Simulator and ripped off the destitute living in the slums, (they are actually living under a bridge,) you go to sleep in your office, wake up the following day, and have to repeat the whole mess over again. This brings us back to the opening of this little article. If I’m developing a twitch after only an hour of play why exactly would I want to keep going? I’m sure you buy grand houses and make them grander and sell them for millions. You probably have to go to the arduous task of getting things just right so that discerning buyers get exactly what they’ve asked for. The thing is you have to get there. The next umpteen hours of the game might be absolutely stellar but I didn’t see them because I got to the third day of play, decided it was just a bit ridiculous, and went off to play something else. Incidentally, once you’ve bought and sold several tents you might have enough to treat the customer to a storage container or school bus. Even if we’re going to do the mental gymnastics to suspend reality enough to make any of this work surely there’s a problem here.

The graphics in REAL ESTATE Simulator are okay if a little basic, the music is fairly nonexistent, and the voiceovers are shocking. The thing is, I like Sims. I was quite looking forward to seeing what Real Estate Simulator had to offer and if it had set me on the road to decorating and selling houses, (think House Flipper,) I’d have forgiven a lot of the obvious failings here. I can forgive dodgy graphics if the game is good, but in this case, it really isn’t. The only genuine positive I have is that this title works. The only thing that’s really scoring it points is that it isn’t a buggy mess, but that shouldn’t be a very high bar to achieve.

All in all, REAL ESTATE Simulator is sub-par in most senses and there are a lot of other SIM titles on Steam that are worth your time and more importantly money. Honestly, if buying and selling houses sounds like fun, go and give House Flipper a try, it’s a game of a similar fashion that handles the Real Estate theme far better than this. You may pick this title up and think I’m talking absolute rubbish, and that’s fine, but if you do buy and play on a whim you might be in for a disappointing experience.