Builder Simulator (Nintendo Switch) Review

Are you looking for a little excitement in your life? Perhaps a career change – just without the uncertainty that would bring? Well, if it’s the latter, simulation games have you covered. Now you too can discover the joy of driving a train through a crowded metro or fixing up a decrepit hotel to sell. Perhaps you want to discover your inner renovator or manage industrial-scale agriculture? Whatever your fancy, the simulator market provides all of these opportunities and more, to a PC or console near you.

Job simulators are a really bizarre proposition, if you think about it. Why would you want a virtual job after dealing with the long, and usually stressful, hours of your real-world one? Perhaps it’s the thrill of the road not taken, or to see how much you might have enjoyed some other opportunity you passed by? Or, perhaps, it’s just a different way to escape from the everyday harshness of life through a different kind of wish fulfilment. Whether you’ve decided to be a smith in an MMO, or start up a tractor to do some cozy farming, the virtual job market continues to grow in popularity.

On that note, Builder Simulator is the latest addition to the genre. It’s aimed at those who’ve always wanted to plan and build a house, possibly their dream home, or just as a contractor for others. Like all simulators, Builder Simulator will take you through the steps of building a house, from the planning stages to the final steps of putting the roof on, and then just a little bit more as well.

The game is broken down into multiple sections: Contracts, Planning, Interior Decorating, Sandbox, and Tutorials.

Of course, you’re going to want to start with the tutorials, which will take you through a series of tasks to show you basics you will need to know for future projects. From the initial planning stages of drafting your design, to digging and concreting the foundations, to the difference between load bearing and partition walls – it’s a necessary step before you jump into the games “Contractor” mode which is, basically, the campaign.

Contractor mode sees you travelling across the world, working on many different aspects of building a home. From the street of Italy to a Caribbean paradise, you’ll be laying down foundations, putting up walls, and decorating interiors. As a traditional campaign, Contractor mode doesn’t really work since there doesn’t seem to be any kind of business progression from one job to the next. Each job has its own budget for you to work with to buy supplies, but it doesn’t seem to carry over. If anything, Contractor mode feels like an expanded tutorial designed to drill the basics of building into you through repetition.

Things start off simple, from mixing concrete to laying foundations, before putting up load bearing walls, interior walls, before building, painting, and tiling an entire home.

Like most simulation games, certain aspects of the tasks can be more repetitive than others. Most notably is running back and forth between a wall and the concrete mixer to stock up on mortar, as well as when putting up load bearing walls where you have to lay down mortar, plop down some bricks and lay down mortar on top of those bricks, and repeat until you’ve built a 7 to 8-foot high wall. Mercifully, partition walls are easier and faster to put up, relying as they do on insulation, panels, and girders to hold them in place.

Thankfully Builder Simulator offers some video-gamey shenanigans to ease this aspect of building. Each task you do can be levelled up so that, eventually you can be laying down five bricks at a go instead of one at a time. Laying mortar also has a mini-game attached to it that if you time a button press right, a whole section of bricks can be coated in one go. And partition walls only have a few screws for you to screw in when you put the panel up as the game automatically has the rest in place.

Pro-tip: Unleash your inner Mario when building walls by standing on top of them while you mortar and brick as it will keep you from having to worry too much about putting up scaffolding and building stools all over the place. Realistic? No. But certainly easier going.

Repetitiveness is obviously part of all games, but more so in simulators. Whether you’re lining up windows and doors, screwing them in and putting on hinges, or climbing up to a roof to lay down tiles, you’re going to be doing the same tasks throughout. But then, that’s a part of a job, isn’t it? You can mitigate mistakes and downtime somewhat by learning to use the Planner: a simple system that lets you map out your walls, paths, second floors, door, and windows on a drafting board. The planner has a built-in checker to make sure that your plans meet the requirements of realism, before letting you save them.

When you’re done with the extensive training modes, “Sandbox” mode, as the name suggests, is the place to go if you want to build without imposed designs. You choose the location, one of the three plot sizes, and away you go. That said, before you can build, you’ll still have to plan out your build on the drafting board, but Sandbox lets you unclip from gravity and fly around while surveying and building from all angles. It’s perfect for those who want to dream up more than what the designers have provided you to work on in Contract Mode.

Finally, for those with an eye for decorative features, “Interior Designer” mode lets you plan out your build and then automatically builds the house for you, leaving you to do the fun stuff like painting the walls and buying various pieces of furniture to liven up your home with.

Performance issues do plague Builder Simulator on the Nintendo Switch, specifically with complex interiors and on larger builds. The frame rate starts to struggle and pop-in becomes very noticeable, specifically on roof tiles. Lighting, as well, could do with some tweaking as it feels like the game has been lit in a cubic manner, where even rooms opposite from each other end up displaying differently. This can muddy the material work in some areas, making it difficult to tell whether or not a texture looks good or not until you apply it to a wall or ceiling that feels like it’s been lit properly.

There are some smaller niggles when it comes to the controls – such as the awkward manner in which a wheelbarrow moves – but the most frustrating issue was the lack of precision when working with smaller items or in tight areas. Changing the camera sensitivity does help somewhat, but between that and the lack of crouching, it can be tough to complete precision work. I can’t tell you how many times I struggled to switch between concrete and mortar on the mixer, just because the smaller elements made hitting the right control difficult.

Going back to an earlier point, Builder Simulator‘s biggest enemy may be its repetition. But, if you’re into job simulation games, then that will be something you’re most likely prepared for. As a casual fan of the genre, that repetition provided some frustration up front, but once I figured out the optimal way to move around and got into the flow of the game, it turned into an enjoyably zen experience.

Sure, it’s a limited system in its present incarnation, but it does teach you the basics of building a house and the amount of money and time that goes into it. Is it going to make you ready to go out and put up a little cabin in your garden all by your lonesome? Probably not, but it will give you an appreciation for all the hard work involved, while maybe inspiring some creativity in how you would like your own house to look. It’s far from been a perfect game, but Builder Simulator is an enjoyable enough one that I’m still drafting up further plans.

Builder Simulator was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One/Series S|X, and PS4/5.