House Builder 2 Review: A Buggy, Soulless Clicker Wearing a Simulator's Skin
The first game was a surprise hit. This is a buggy, "AI slop" mobile game wearing its skin.
I need to start by setting expectations. I've heard good things about the first House Builder, a solid sim with a dedicated and positive following. So I was genuinely excited for a sequel.
What I got instead is a "meme version" of the original. This isn't House Builder 2 (Except in name) it's a cheap, soulless cash grab that feels more like a mobile game knock-off than a proper PC title.
The "Building" Is Gone. It's a Clicker Now.
The biggest sin is the core gameplay. The first game, from what I've seen, actually had you preparing materials and engaging with the build process. House Builder 2 throws all that in the trash.
The "advanced building mechanic" the Steam page boasts about? It's just... holding left-click. You point your mouse at a glowing green spot, and the game does the rest, complete with a "million staple guns" sound effect.
All the measuring, planning, and thinking is gone. This is a point-and-click exercise, an idle clicker masquerading as a building sim.
An Open World of Frustration
The "big new feature" is the open world. This means that instead of just building, you now get to participate in the most tedious loop imaginable: driving your piece-of-shit truck to a warehouse, buying materials, and trying to "Tetris" them into the back.
The physics are so nonexistent that your entire load will just clip through the truck and fall onto the road the second you take a turn.
The map itself is a static, useless JPEG that doesn't even show you where your job is after the first few missions. And the world is lifeless, populated by robots walking on set paths.
After a few jobs, the game gives up on this loop anyway and just starts spawning the materials at the site for you, as if it knows its own mechanic is terrible.
A Technical and Logical Nightmare
This thing is rough. I've fallen through the map multiple times. I got my truck stuck, hit the "unstuck" button, and watched as I was teleported to safety, leaving my vehicle behind.
The art style isn't charming "low-poly"; it's cheap low effort slop The voice acting is audibly, terribly AI-generated.
The game's logic is just as broken. My second contract, after building a simple fence, was to build an entire house. I saved up €10k to buy the one other house on the map, only to find it doesn't have a bed, making it completely useless since the bed is the only way to save or skip time.
Why is there a furniture store? This is House Builder, not House Flipper.
The Verdict
This isn't an "Early Access" game that just needs polish. This is a fundamental betrayal of the first game's premise. The devs took a solid sim, gutted its core, and replaced it with buggy, tedious, mobile-game mechanics.
It feels like a quick, uninspired cash grab. I can't recommend this to anyone, especially fans of the original.
Score: 3/10 - Like Bob the Builder's depressed, buggy, AI-generated cousin.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
You might also like
Reus 2 Review: A Deep, Addictive, and Chill God-Game Puzzle I Can’t Stop Playing
DREAMOUT Review: Drunk Alpaca Simulator is the Existential Crisis I Didn’t Know I Needed
Macabre Review: A Game With a Brilliant Idea and a Brain-Dead Monster
Hollywood Animal Early Access Review: The Studio Tycoon Game That Cheated Us With Its Own Toxicity
Town to City Review: The Cozy Builder That Finally Let Me Stop Hating City Builders