Electrician Simulator Review

Developed by Take IT Studio and published by Gaming Factory and Ultimate Games S.A., Electrician Simulator is a rather self-explanatory title. Choose a name and a company logo, then follow in your father's footsteps to become the best electrician in your local area. Now I’ve actually tried to repair some electronics in real life, like my 3DS and my third-party Xbox One controller. My 3DS ended up working fine afterwards, while the controller is in pieces sitting in a drawer with other junk. So that makes me qualified to review this game right?

The game starts with a tutorial which is framed around your dad moving you into your first house while getting you started on your path to becoming an electrician. The tutorial is actually really important as it does give you some generally good tips when working with electricity, and if you aren't careful you will get yourself electrocuted. The controls are pretty simple. Left lick to interact with things, hold left click down to inspect it and do more detailed work like screwing in light bulbs, or taking apart a lamp. All standard stuff that you see in these types of games. I appreciate being able to automatically turn screws at a click rather than needing to hold it down. It kills your fingers after a while and you do a lot of screwing and unscrewing in this game so this is a nice thing to have. 

I have terrible cable management.

Apart from changing light bulbs and fixing sockets, you'll also have to do some wiring to hook up everything to make all the lights turn on. It's probably the most complicated part of Electrician Simulator. You'll have to create a web of cables connecting power sources and switches to the fuse box so that everything is functional. It takes some thought, but I could just hook up everything to one switch and the game would accept that as a proper solution. And given how much lighting plays a part in the game, you’ll sometimes be working in the dark with just a flashlight to help you see. With some of the job scenarios you end up doing, I was fully expecting the game to turn into a horror game at any moment. Somewhat unfortunately, my fears were not realised.

However some jobs will allow you to stay at home and work on repairing smaller electronics like hair-dryers and gamepads. Taking stuff apart, finding what's wrong, and then putting it back together again is fun enough; however, they make you buy your own tools before you can do anything – which I found completely unnecessary. There are only five tools available for this type of job—screwdriver, tweezers, multimeter, soldering iron, rust spray—but only the last two have finite uses. Don't worry though, they will last through the entire campaign due to how short the game is. Despite these tools being called "upgrades", they can't be improved in any way.

I was seriously waiting for a jumpscare.

From a technical standpoint, I didn’t really run into anything wrong with the game, apart from when I found it difficult to line up and click on things. It had relatively short load times and there wasn’t anything I found annoying. The only real gripe I had was just how lacking the game had in terms of content to play around with; There isn't really much sense of progression. You start out with $200 and a slow screwdriver that takes three seconds to do its job, but by the end you'll have $5,000 and a really fast screwdriver that takes one second to do its job. That's it. I didn't feel like I was learning anything, experiencing the struggles of being an electrician, or getting better at my simulated job. I was just kind of doing each task without much thought and stumbling into completing it while occasionally buying a better screwdriver. 

I finished the main campaign in four hours. For full completion, I estimate you only need an additional 2-3 hours just for grinding out money and finding and completing a hidden minigame. With only 30 missions, you run out of things to do very quickly. You do have a house to customise to your liking, but all you can do is add sockets, switches, lighting and hanging TVs, all of which you have to install yourself. The game would've benefited with a sandbox mode or infinitely generating jobs.

Overall, Electrician Simulator was a nice experience, but I don’t really see myself revisiting this game in the future, if at all. If anything, Electrician Simulator needs more content to really make it worth the money. Maybe you should spend an extra £6 for House Flipper for something more replayable and satisfying.