REAL ESTATE Simulator - FROM BUM TO MILLIONAIRE Review

REAL ESTATE Simulator - FROM BUM TO MILLIONAIRE promises a deep and dynamic business sim, immersing you in a world all about property ownership, where the sun revolves around sales signs, new furniture, and homebuyers’ dreams. You’re placed in the shoes of a broke real estate agent whose windowless, basement-level office isn’t really ideal for selling luxurious properties. But everyone has to start from somewhere, right? You’ll buy and sell your way to better office spaces and to the top of the industry, a journey that, according to the Steam description, will have you navigating market trends, negotiating deals, and outsmarting competitors.

The gameplay loop is consistent throughout, as it has you visit a location and buy properties for sale there, which you’ll then decorate with furniture or new flooring and wallpaper, increasing the space’s value from anywhere between one and five stars. Once you’re ready to put your property up for sale, you’ll return to your office, set the price for the home, and clients will roll in with their budgets and demands.

You’ll stake your Premium Real Estate sign in three vastly different neighbourhoods: Slums, Suburbs, and City. Starting with the “bum” part of the game’s title, you’ll begin this property tycoon adventure in the Slums, selling tents, shipping containers, and school buses as homes — right next to the entrance of a sewage tunnel. These typically go for extremely low prices, which you can turn around and sell for much more just by decorating them with a sleeping bag.

Truthfully, this felt wrong. I’m not sure if this initial neighbourhood is supposed to be some sort of commentary on the impossible real-life housing market that negatively affects renters and home buyers alike on a daily basis, but either way, I couldn’t get behind buying and selling literal camping tents in this setting and yielding a profit from it. This blocked any budding immersion at the beginning, and from a gameplay perspective, it quickly became tedious and repetitive. Slums properties reach their maximum value after you decorate them with one item (the aforementioned sleeping bag), so until you make enough money to sell homes in the Suburbs, you’re not using other features, such as the ability to change flooring or walls. Instead, it’s like you’re stuck in a perpetual tutorial, and one can only sell so many identical tents before getting bored.

If you’ve ever looked for a new living space, you know price plays a big factor in your search, but it’s not the sole thing driving your decision. Other features come into play, such as the floorplan, landscaping, condition, location, etc. In REAL ESTATE Simulator, NPCs decide their forever home based primarily on numbers and value, which causes the ultimate process of selling a home to be less dynamic than I expected. Additionally, several customers will often come in with the same requirements, which can get old, or you might have three identical-looking NPCs standing in your office, which is just strange. I originally thought there would be more of a challenge and variety, requiring you to tailor a home to a client’s needs. Perhaps I’d need to put an elderly couple in a one-story house or a family near a school, but this game has none of that extra detail to it.

Whether you’re selling homes from the Slums, Suburbs, or City, all clients come in with number-focused criteria for you to meet, such as “I need a house at price $64,500” or “I need a house with values 1 or 2 at the Slums.” You can propose your home for sale, but if it doesn’t fit their needs, they’ll say they budgeted for something more expensive (or cheaper) and walk out. The problem is that NPCs’ reactions to your home and price proposals don’t have any rhyme or reason to them, and I was often rejected for unclear reasons.

There were times I offered a home at the exact price the client requested, and they declined. What’s more perplexing was when someone would come in saying, “I need a house from values 1 to 4,” and I’d offer them a property that fits within the range, but they responded that it was too cheap, offering no other explanation before they leave. At one point, I had three individuals come in with the exact same criteria, and I offered them all the same house, but two declined, and one accepted; I was left wondering what hidden checkboxes the game had behind the scenes. I also had to wonder if this was how the sim was intended to work or if the system was just buggy.

When you finally get a bite on an offer, you’ll take that client from your office to the house and negotiate the final sale price, which actually allows you to increase your asking price significantly, and the client will just agree to it. Similarly, when you’re buying a property to sell, you can just undercut heavily, and the NPC will seal a deal for thousands under their asking price. It’s never consistent, though. So, more often than not, REAL ESTATE Simulator just feels like punching numbers in and hoping for the best when it comes to negotiations.

A large part of the gameplay loop focuses on flipping properties from rundown, neglected spaces to move-in ready homes with new floors, walls, and furniture. This felt out of place to me since customers aren’t coming to you with specific desires beyond their budget. That said, each item you place adds value to the home with more expensive items making the most impact. However, I did discover there’s no difference between placing 10 high-value beds in a living room versus actually setting up the place normally with a couch, chairs, etc. These customers never baulked at my decision to put a dresser in the kitchen or a couch in the garage.

It would’ve been great if the decorations at least looked good, but they made me feel like a mediocre decorator, as they’re all quite visually unappealing. Your selection is very limited, the colours are drab, and the styles don’t do much to elevate a space. What you can do in a home is also sparse, restricting you to interior changes; you can’t alter the exterior paint or landscaping, for example, nor can you change the colour of a built-in bookshelf or swap out appliances. In my experience, the items bugged out several times, as well. Sometimes, I’d return to a home to find the sofa I placed had miraculously transformed into a wardrobe. A problem I experienced more frequently was flooring and wallpaper clipping into rooms where they shouldn’t be. Eventually, I just stopped caring since everything looked so bad despite my best efforts, and I began turning each house into a monstrosity of mismatched decor.

Overall, REAL ESTATE Simulator - FROM BUM TO MILLIONAIRE doesn’t follow through on the promise of a deep, dynamic sim. It’s repetitive, shallow, and even a bit buggy at times. Visually, the homes and decorations are poorly designed, and gameplay-wise, finding buyers and negotiating prices is a bore. It ultimately fails to capture the essence of the home buying and selling experience, and what’s here just isn’t enjoyable to play.