If you have ever wanted to dip your toes in the Real Estate game, or if you think yourself a bit of a negotiation wizard, then Kiki Games has made your dream a reality with Estate Agent Simulator. The main objective of this title is to buy, sell, and rent property, and after your initial investment, you can upgrade and decorate the properties to increase their market value.

The first thing that came to mind when I first loaded in was that it’s a blend of House Flipper and Powerwash Simulator, with a little bit of The Sims thrown in for good measure, but after sinking a little bit of time into it, it just feels like a roleplaying game about being a Real Estate Agent and living the lavish life after you flip a couple of houses.

The actual Real Estate Agent aspect of the title felt unfinished – you just jump on the bus or walk around the streets, and you’ll find a house with a huge banner out the front and someone standing there with, “Agent needed,” floating above their heads. Just walk up to them, negotiate a price, purchase the property, and if you decide to rent it out, check your PC or Tablet to see how it’s going. It really didn’t feel like I had to manage the property or even try to compete with other agents, and prices were negotiated without even checking the property out – you took a chance based on what you saw from the footpath.

Following suit, the cleaning system also felt very rinse and repeat – pick up rubbish, wash the walls, and spray the cockroaches. It didn’t matter how much you paid for the property, it always seemed to be the same. I feel like a more realistic approach would have been to allow you to check the property over, with varying levels and different types of mess and pest infestations that would help to determine the price of the house.

It also would have been nice to see similar things with the yard, letting you negotiate based on the amount of work required to tidy that up and make it presentable, giving more of a completed look to the house. There is also a building system in play, but I found this to be more upsetting than anything. Once you’ve earned enough money to build the house you want and picked out a block of land, it’s just highlighted, and over the course of a few in-game days, a progress bar fills up to determine how far along the build is. I would have preferred to have seen a construction team, or some kind of animation to make it look like the house was being built.

The furnishing system was a little more involved, even though it was slightly buggy. The idea was fantastic in that you needed to purchase the furniture online, drive on down in your ute, or as the Americans call it, a pickup truck, pick it up, and then take it back to the house. Once home, the placement system lets you easily place the new addition and get it into whatever angle you were hoping for. This was something I really enjoyed, but all of your hard work is gone in an instant should you happen to forget to save, and I suffered through several crashes during my time with Estate Agent Simulator.

As with 99% of simulators, the controls were pretty straightforward and well-utilised. It’s your usual WASD for movement and a couple of buttons to interact with items. There’s really no need to change them up, but there are a couple of settings I wished that I could. There is a camera sway as you’re moving around, making movement an unpleasant experience, and the lack of an autosave leads to a lot of frustrations.

I felt particularly let down by the graphics, with simulators feeling like they’re being left behind, and some more so than others. Estate Agent Simulator was no exception, with the cars and characters suffering the most – they almost looked like they were designed in MS Paint before being made into a 3D Model.

The cars would have looked amazing if there had been some texture work done, but instead, they looked like they were painted with matte paint, really suffering from a lack of reflective surfaces. The environmental graphics weren’t much better, and the houses reminded me of the old S.W.A.T games on the PS1 with how they looked. Had they gone into further detail, I think I could have forgiven the repetitive gameplay loop.

The first time I booted up this game the Xbox Achievement sound would ding each time you collected rubbish, but this has since been removed with their latest update. It’s a little upsetting, as it gave a false sense of achievement as you tidied up, but I can understand the legal reasoning behind it. Otherwise, the sounds annoyed me more than anything, and it didn’t matter where I was, but I could constantly hear a horse, and while you can eventually buy one when you have the money, the sound seemed to follow me like a bad smell, even in the middle of town.

Other sounds weren’t much different and I found them agitating me more than anything, so I ended up turning them right down to listen to some music. I was also disappointed that there weren’t any voice lines, not even little grunts or groans as you move items around, and there’s a lot of text to read when you’re negotiating a price.

Given I’ve been really enjoying simulators the last few times we’ve had a chance to review them, I’ll be keeping an eye out for updates to Estate Agent Simulator, but unless there are improvements to graphics and sounds, and some additional gameplay content to mix things up more, it’s not something I can see myself picking up again. As it currently stands, Estate Agent Simulator is a game that I can only recommend to players who enjoy repetitive gameplay and aren’t too concerned about anything else.

Written by: Hayden Nelson