Builder Simulator – Review

Builder Simulator joins the long line of simulation games, with the promise of a greater level of depth and detail for fans to create the house of their dreams, build it and then decorate and furnish it. So is this the cement of a solid simulation, or just a pile of rubble.

Builder Simulator sounds like it offers you everything, and when you head into the main game menu, things look reassuring, as well as a tutorial, you’ve got the planner and interior designer modes as well as contracts and a full sandbox.

You’ll want to start off with tutorial which introduces you to a clap-trap type buddy called “Bill Dirr” who will talk you through 12 stages of building a small house.

its pretty straight forward and covers everything you’ll need to know, but it’s still a relatively glossed over progress of building your house from scratch.

The closest thing to a “career” is in Contracts, which offer specific tasks on pre-defined levels, there’s 16 in total, but sadly this is where a few disappointments start to creep in, at least the first three of those sixteen are all the same building which is little more than you e already done in the tutorial and to make things worse, after completing the first and starting the second, it simply loaded back to the start of the first contract. Repeating the same tasks three times, I still couldn’t progress to the second contract, so at this time, that entire game mode is dead on the water, fingers crossed the developers fix that quickly, becasuse it’s not the best foundation for building a successful game.

Thankfully beyond contracts, there’s still three more game modes to enjoy, and to be perfectly honest, sandbox is where you’ll probably be spending most of your time anyway.

Planner and Interior designer allow you to concentrate on the design stage, while interior designer lets you skip the planning and building stage and move on to making everything look nice. Planner is great if you want to spend time designing a home to save and work on another time, but for the best experience you’ll want to jump into sandbox mode.

Sandbox starts off allowing you to choose your preferred location from 9 options, covering suburbs, countryside, an Italian town, winter forest or even a swamp. Next you’ll have a choice of plot sizes, with 7, 16 and 30 square metre grids.

Once you’ve selected your chosen plot of land it’s onto the design stage, you can load a design you’ve made previously or randomly generate one, but the best experience is taking the time to decide where you want the walls, doors, windows, stairs and even path and swimming pool to curate your own creation.

The designer tools are pretty straight forward, and while not always the easiest to use and select, it does a pretty good job of giving you the freedom to design what you want.

There’s a few hoops to jump through, such as making sure doors aren’t too close together, but there’s a confirmation tool which will tell you if there’s anything you need to address before progressing.

Once designed, you’ll move on to building your new home, starting off with the foundations.

All tools are on the LB scroll-wheel, and there’s a store accessible via the view button allowing you to buy the materials you’ll need to complete the job.

From digging the first sections of the foundation, laying bricks or applying mortar, there’s always pretty clear highlights of what you have to do next, as well as a checklist on the left that tells you specifically.

It makes the entire process pretty easy to wrap your head around, and while building can be a little tedious when mixing and laying cement numerous times, other areas are far more simplified, such as click-and-hold to place a brick and then just moving your cursor around to automatically lay others where you look.

Theres quite a few stages to building, and while the process can feel a little tedious at times, there’s always holding the right analogue stick once you’ve had a decent stab at the current task, to skip the rest and move onto the next item on the list.

Skipping comes in handy with some pieces, such as cementing, but it sometimes jumps a little too far, after placing all the guides for partition walls, I was hoping skip would just miss the last few partitions, but instead it jumped beyond the entire process of putting those walls up.

As you eventually work through the entire building process, you’ll then be able to plaster, paint and decorate your new abode, plaster and painting is definitely an easy process and it won’t take long to get your new build looking a little more desirable.

the final step is furniture, with quite a range on offer from the in-game store, you can kit out each room and make everything look like a brand new show home.

The options aren’t endless, but between paint, wood types, wallpaper, units or even a pile of books on a shelf, there’s more than enough variety to make the finished product look unique and professional.

Ultimately the entire process is a little stretched out and tiresome, but if you take your time and put some pride in your work, you’ll be able to take that same pride away from your achievements when you’ve built the finished product..

Working through each task of building isn’t helped by some occasionally awkward controls, clearly made for mouse and keyboard, controls haven’t ported over well to a gamepad, with look sensitivity too high, even adjusting the sole relavant setting, I was still knocking the cursor back and forth for precise selections such as using the cement mixer to switch between cement and mortar.

Likewise when pushing that wheelbarrow around (something you’ll have to do quite often), controls feel unresponsive and frustrating which makes some steps of the building process a little more daunting and repetitive than they needed to be.

Eventually though, with some patience, it’s easy enough to work through these tough sections and once everything is built, it’s time to move on to making things look nice.

As mentioned above, theres a good variation of designs and style, but graphics aren’t really the strongest part of Builder Simulator, it might have been impressive in the early years of Xbox One, but now years into the Series X|S consoles, there’s really nothing next-gen about the appearance of your creations.

Theres no denying there’s plenty of fun designing and building your dream house from the first brick to the final lick of paint, but Builder Simulator is ultimately let down by a dissapointing level of bugs and any sort of longevity a full career mode would have introduced, such as gradually working towards larger plots, more complex designs or even just more varied and expensive furnishings.

It’s possible the week delay for release will fix a few bugs or even improve the controls, but overall, With last-gen performance in both presentation and gameplay, there’s enough to please simulation enthusiasts, but there’s not that level of finesse for newcomers found in games like House Flipper.

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