Arena Renovation Review

Back in April 2023, I previewed an Early Access version of Arena Renovation. Fast-forward almost a year later, and the full release is here! Although I came across a few bugs and smaller issues, has developer Nesalis Games renovated the experience, or does the finished product feel unchanged from the earlier build?

The premise of Arena Renovation is a simple one: renovate dilapidated arenas! Crazy, right? These range from small indoor tennis courts, high school gyms, to outdoor venues, and beyond. Bring these facilities back to their former glory as you clean, paint, repair, and more! Sure, this doesn’t sound particularly exciting; if I were tasked with doing this in real life you wouldn’t see me for dust. However, much like many other simulators of this type, Arena Renovation is a laid-back experience that doesn’t put you up against a time limit or difficult scenarios, allowing players to take their time and tackle each task in any order.

As far as simulator titles go, this isn’t too bad in terms of visuals. However, that doesn’t mean it’s gorgeous to look at. Of course, you will start with each arena in a state of disrepair, so the murky colours and simple textures are rather fitting. Once the renovation is complete, things are a little more colourful (assuming you didn’t just paint everything pure black), but the environments are still rather bland. The lack of variety in objects that need to be destroyed or thrown away doesn’t help, and you’ll quickly notice the same placement of the same set of desks on almost every map.

The sound design was also not exactly brilliant. For what little music that’s played throughout the missions — which seemed to be very rare, outside of menus — you’ll be hearing the same generic themes played constantly. The sound effects when breaking up larger objects are satisfying, at least; there’s nothing like the splintering of wood after a swift hammer blow to boost those serotonin levels! Overall, though, it just feels like a bit of a muted experience, with not enough variation in both music and sound effects. Definitely one to play whilst listening to a podcast!

While the Early Access build seemed to include a fair number of bugs, this full release looks to have drastically cut down on the issues I originally encountered. There is still frequent stuttering when performing actions, and movement isn’t exactly smooth, but they’re certainly not the worst issues I’ve come across. Loading times, however, are a real pain. They are long. Like, irritatingly long. With a spinning icon and static image being all that’s shown, it’s easier to just Alt-Tab out and wait for the in-game sound effects to hit. Otherwise, staring at the same few images with no indication of how far the loading has progressed may be a reasonable cause to give up on the game entirely.

After being placed in each level, you may find yourself asking, “Where on Earth do I start?” Well, that’s completely up to you! Every room/area in the game has its own individual progress bars, with an overall progress meter in the top-left of the HUD. Each room is broken down into three different aspects: Cleanliness, Renovation, and Furnishing. These are all self-explanatory, but cleaning involves things such as removing litter, jet-washing graffiti off the walls, and using a sledgehammer to break down larger objects. The Renovation meter will increase as you do things such as paint the ceilings, plaster the walls, and so on. Finally, adding furniture from a rather generous selection to choose from will fill up the Furnishing meter. This allows a bit of creative freedom, as you could, in theory, fill a locker room with just toilets. The progression to filling the meter will be much slower than if you’d have placed the relevant items, but hey, who am I to judge?

I liked that I could tackle these objectives in any order, although I always went with tidying, repairing, then furnishing. If you wanted to place the furniture first before moving on to cleaning, then you could, although I would think less of you for this absolute insanity (I know I said I wouldn’t judge earlier, but there’s a limit!). No matter how you tackle an arena, practically anything you do rewards you with XP. Earn enough, and you’ll level up, giving you skill points to spend on a variety of upgrades — such as a longer reach and quicker cleaning skills — that will make your renovating life easier.

If you prefer a bit more structure, each arena has its own set of unique missions to tackle, such as turning on the electricity or hunting down objects. These can be done at any point during the other tasks, and no arena requires 100% completion for you to be able to move on, but if you’re not completely cleaning every area in every arena, are you really playing the game right? That said, these missions do little to stave off the eventual repetition the game falls into. It’s tough to think of many ways to make cleaning increasingly larger areas more varied, but it does lose its appeal rather quickly.

Arena Renovation is certainly not a game with original ideas. What it is, however, is a stress-free gaming experience (if you don’t count the long load times) that, just like most other job simulator games, will kill a few hours while you’re waiting for something with more substance to download. Not awful by any means, but this is still one to maybe hold off on for a little while longer, at least until the devs do a bit of renovation on the game itself.