Review: REAL ESTATE Simulator or what I’m renaming, “Loading Screen: The Game” is joyless and soul-sucking

Let’s just cut to the chase, you’ve seen the title and the score. So, you know that this review isn’t going to be highlighting a great gameplay experience. REAL ESTATE Simulator is very simple and straightforward in the worst of ways.

You play as a real estate agent on the lowest wrung of the hierarchy. You only have access to do business in the “slums”. If you’re thinking you’ll just be selling more rundown homes here, you need to think smaller.

The Slums are literally just tents, shipping crates, and one school bus that exists under a veritable overpass. Your goal is to buy these at a low price and flip them for a profit. So, how do you scale up a tent to add value to it? A sleeping bag. Yeah, I’m not kidding. If you pop in a $49 sleeping bag, you can scale up the price by hundreds of dollars.

Oh, I’m sorry, did the hundreds part confuse you? What if I told you that these tents START at $600? Yup. You are buying random tents at a premium and then charging about $200 more for them. I’ve seen tents as high as $1200 and it’s the same exact tent.

You’re gonna have to buy and sell tents about 6-10 times before you can get enough to buy a shipping crate. From here, it starts getting easier to make a profit, but it’s not any more fun. It’s the same game, but a different “home”.

Whether it’s a tent, shipping crate, defunct school bus, or the eventual home; all you’re doing is buying low, popping the barest of items in, and selling.

You’d think that it’s fine because it scales, right? You should be able to expect a decent return on your investments. Except that you can’t. Once you get into the actual houses, you quickly learn that there is a cap. 

Sorry, sir, you don’t have a permit to sell that high.

In your current office, you can’t sell houses for more than 65k. So, when you’re buying houses for upwards of 50k, you start to slow down your progress again. I don’t know why you can’t sell a house for more than that, but the game very clearly tells you that you ‘can’t sell this in this office.’

So, that means that we need a newer office to be able to sell higher. Now, you’re back in the grind of selling low, doing the bare minimum, and selling as high as you can until you can find the 75k for a new office.

Except you also need a product; so you really need 75k + whatever you buy a house for. I’ll be so real with you guys, I didn’t do the grind to get into the new office. I was absolutely tapped out by this point.

It was literally the same thing over and over and over again. To be fair, it might not have been so bad if not for all the back and forth.

I know I mentioned loading screens earlier, so let’s break it down.

You start in your office, but you need to get to the slums. So, you leave your office into a loading screen. Outside your office, you walk up some stairs, turn a corner, and interact with the bus stop into a loading screen. You’re dropped in the slums where you walk down an incline and up to a tent. When you go into the tent, it’s a loading screen. When you leave a tent, it’s a loading screen.

Are you seeing a pattern here? Let’s say you made a deal: if you knew to buy the sleeping bag before you left the office, then you could pop it down. If you didn’t, you have to go to the office, order it, and come back. 

LOADING…

Let me remind you that it’s a loading screen every time you interact with a home and every time you interact with the bus station.

So, you pop the sleeping bag down, leave into the loading screen, walk up the incline to interact with the bus station, and – happy day! – you can choose the office straight off. After a loading screen, you interact with your computer where you buy items or list homes and then wait for people to come to you.

They either want what you’re selling or AI voices tell you over and over how that’s not the deal they wanted. If you get someone interested, you go into a loading screen to the place. Now, ONLY in this scenario can you leave this place straight into the office. However, you have no option to just leave the tent. You either go to the office or you get dropped off at the bus station.

If you still had business in the slums, too bad, you have to walk back down to the row of tents.

And that’s REAL ESTATE Simulator. You do one thing, wait for a loading screen, do the next thing, wait for the loading screen, and so on and so forth. If you do this enough times, you win the game. But, who has the time? Who has the willpower?

In no way, shape, or form, can I suggest this game. Visually, it’s fine – cookie cutter – but fine. And I didn’t run into any bugs during gameplay. It’s just not fun. At all.

If you want to torture yourself, you can try out REAL ESTATE Simulator for $12.99, but I highly suggest you choose kindness for yourself and check out a different game. I had a lot of fun with Ova Magica, go play that.