Castle Renovator Review

Game: Castle Renovator
Genre: Building Sim, Renovation Sim
System: Switch (also available for PS4 & Xbox One)
Developer|Publisher: Ultimate Games
Age Rating: UK 7+ | US E
Price: UK £12.59 | EU € 13,99 | USD $14.49
Release Date: April 13th, 2023

Review code used, with many thanks to Ultimate Games.

Castle Renovator is a building simulation game where players need to restore and clean up medieval castles, towns, and homes. Players must learn to build, repair, clean, and even catch rats to make every level as clean and perfect for the folks of these small, ancient towns.

The Gameplay of Castle Renovator

If you are familiar with the building stuff genre, Castle Renovator will look and feel much like others you probably have played. It has the same basic controls as House Flipper and resembles Powerwash Simulator. Players must wash, pick up garbage, build structures, choose furniture, and more to make these old houses and castles back into homes.

Use the Scroll Wheel for Tools

Players have a scroll wheel of possible tools, and each tutorial adds a new tool to the wheel. You can choose from Clean, Build, Demolish, and others to do whatever needs doing. The Clean function allows players to wash stains from the walls; Demolish removes tree stumps and unwanted walls, etc. Players need to get into the menu, then interact with the item to clean it or what have you.

The game has two different modes: the Home mode and the Quest mode. In Quest mode, players are out in the world, doing pre-determined jobs to make money and get resources. In Home mode, you can fix up and add to your own home, building up your basic wooden structure over time into a big old castle, can gain additional people to live on your land and work with you, and sell and buy things.

The more you play and the more jobs you do, the bigger the population of your own little plot of land grows, giving you access to more and more vendors.

How Long Does Castle Renovator Take to Beat?

There is a lot to do in this game. Castle Renovator is MASSIVE. There are loads of jobs, lots of building materials to unlock, and a bunch of NPCs to befriend. It takes about 10-15 hours to unlock all the achievements, but I honestly could spend that long just building my house.

In similar games, I have spent tens of hours putting together the perfect home or office or dog park or whatever. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? It’s sort of like someone made a whole game out of the character creation screen that I always spend forever playing with.

This is one of the biggest pros of playing Castle Renovator. There are many different types of building pieces, furniture, looks, layouts, and things to do. There’s a large skill tree for getting faster at destroying, cleaning, and building. Players have a lot of choices of what to do with their space. There are loads of quests to do to earn money and supplies.

In other words, for $20 USD, there’s a ton to do. It certainly seems to be worth the investment based on how much you can get out of it.

However, There Are Cons

Castle Renovator is one of those games that feels like it just needs a little more time in the oven. It has a lot going for it, for sure. It’s fun, it’s big, and though some of it is definitely derivative, it is unique. But for all that, it’s a little clumsy.

Everything feels just a little bit off. The hit-boxes are a little too small, making some of the quest items into chores. For example, there is a “furniture fixing” thing you have to do occasionally, requiring players to interact with a nail to resecure some legs back onto the chairs. The nails are small, and players must precisely line up the hammer to hit them. The same thing applies to the rats you must catch in some locations; they are fast, small, and annoying.

Each level has hidden items like little written notes (similar to the text messages in Powerwash Simulator) that give background to characters that don’t seem to matter much to the quest but are kind of cute. There are also hidden chests containing money located around each map, but some of them are so out of the way it took me forever to find them.

Like, I don’t mind hidden objects, but I shouldn’t spend more time trying to find one treasure chest with 500 gold in it than I did actually rebuilding the house.

More Issues’

These weren’t the only issues I had with Castle Renovator either; the slight jank with the controls and too-big maps were nothing compared to the lack of comprehensive tutorials. I had to figure out a lot of things myself. There is an option to sell off the items I put into the storage to get back money and wood, but I don’t remember ever seeing any kind of tutorial about it. If there was, it was in an information dump when the game just throws a bunch of text at you and expects you to take it in, which is the worst kind of tutorial.

Here are some other items I took issue with:

• You can’t actually interact with any of the NPCs that come to live around your house. They don’t seem to do much except wiggle around. It’s a shame; there could have been at least some basic dialogue.
• There is a dirt scanning system early on. But if you get stuck on something, there’s not much of a hint system to help out. It just goes unfinished if you never find that third tool to put back in the box.
• Only certain kinds of wood can be used for certain jobs. Though the game doesn’t do a great job of indicating where one is used over another.
• I have the blue light setting very low on my computer, so the green-bluish tint Castle Renovator used to show where something is supposed to go isn’t very noticeable. I wish there were more options for changing the colors of things and more colorblindness accessibility modes.

Conclusion

I like Castle Renovator. There is a lot of potential in what is presented. However, considering that this game was released in late 2022 for the PlayStation and Xbox, you would think most of the jank would have been addressed before the devs decided to port this to Switch.

There is something missing in Castle Renovator that is hard to pinpoint exactly. It’s the heart of whatever made House Flipper so fun to play. The comedy and weirdness that made Powerwash Simulator what it was, the smoothness of movement and the beauty of the graphics that just isn’t there in Castle Renovator.

There were a lot of interesting ideas here. Little mini-games to unlock new furniture, interesting designs to make a home with, and a funny premise to tie it all together. Castle Renovator could have been a ton of fun; it has much to do, a small price tag, and okay graphics.

I think it just needs some more playtesting and a little more love. I’m not saying fixing the jank is simple, but it would be worth it. Castle Renovator feels like someone put a lot into it; it just fell short of the mark a little.

I look forward to returning to this title in a year or two. Hopefully, the devs will have read all the criticism and implemented some changes by then.

Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure