From the makers of House Flipper and The Tenants comes a new game called The Constructors, revealed today at the PC Gaming Show. It promises a very different take on home renovations. Where House Flipper focuses on fixing up individual houses, The Constructors is all about large-scale work: Knocking down old buildings, putting up new ones, designing neighborhoods, and shaping the urban landscape of the city of Wondersville.
As the owner of a big construction company, everything comes down to you. Creating the neighborhoods of the future is obviously a big part of it, but there is no glory without mundanity. You'll also have to get all the necessary permits and paperwork, hire contractors to actually get the job done, deal with clients who may not be entirely happy with how things are going, address environmental concerns, handle protesters, and maybe occasionally decide whether a turned head or cut corner might be better (for your profits) in the long run than playing by the rules.
I've never been a big fan of games that replicate real-world jobs (if I wanted a job, you know, I'd get a job), but The Constructors comes from a background that promises to make the experience interesting. The original House Flipper, released in 2018 "is like Viscera Cleanup Detail only for super gross houses," which is immediately intriguing in my book, and was successful enough to spawn a sequel that's expected out in 2023. The Tenants, meanwhile, comes at home ownership and maintenance from a very different perspective: that of a landlord, and in Jorge's case, a very bad one. (Naturally he pointed the finger at Cindy, "the worst tenant ever," for driving him to become a slumlord.)
"The tenant/owner relationship dynamics is really what sets The Tenants apart from other management sims," Jorge said in his 2021 look at The Tenants, and I hope The Constructors will offer the same thing across a wider range of interactions. Laying out playgrounds and putting up apartment buildings is entertaining in its own right, but maneuvering through a maze of government regulations, union bosses, angry customers, iffy suppliers, shouting picketers, and (I have to assume) shadowy mob guys sounds to me like where the real fun is.
The Constructors doesn't have a release date yet, but is available for wishlisting on Steam.
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