This co-op building sim took my favorite part of The Sims 4 and made it into its own game
Hometopia has the best parts of The Sims 4 and House Flipper
This upcoming building sim is the perfect mix of The Sims 4 and House Flipper, and it's out as soon as next month.
If there's one thing I love, it's a good home renovation simulator. I'm a huge fan of the House Flipper series, have dabbled in The Sims 4 (and very quickly dropped it after I built my Sims' dream home), and have had a lot of fun with Hotel Renovator. Now, Hometopia is on the scene and is almost guaranteed to win me over as it features pretty much everything I love about the games listed here and more.
According to Hometopia's Steam page, this co-op building sim is "seriously satisfying" and lets players build houses, decorate them, and purchase fixer-uppers. One thing that makes this sim unique is that it allows up to four players to work together to breathe new life into entire neighbourhoods, let's hope you all have the same taste or you're going to end up with a street full of mix-and-match houses.
To get a real idea of Hometopia's offerings, take a look at its trailer below.
In Hometopia, players will start a career with the Hometopia Realtor Group where they'll renovate homes, plan the layout, stage the rooms inside, and design their own furniture. When they're not renovating homes or developing neighborhoods with friends, players can also get to work designing their own dream home - which is just one of the perks of the job, I guess.
I love the idea of having both a first-person view of a house (like in House Flipper) and the option to switch to an overhead view (like in The Sims 4) so you've got access to the entire house you're working on. This way, it'll be super easy to plot out a room before you get up close and personal and start decorating it. I can't tell you the number of times I've done this in a game without the two options and ended up with furniture that's not actually in the right place because I can't see where it is in relation to the rest of the room.
Although there's already a lot to look forward to, Hometopia's developer - appropriately named Hometopia.inc - has said that the game is "in constant and active development" and that it plans to create "a lasting and deep experience - not just with content updates, but plenty of new features." This includes things like terraforming, in-game contests, more building and customization tools, a weather system, seasons, and more.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Hometopia is set to release on September 27, 2023, for PC, you can keep track of this one by wishlisting it on Steam and following the developer on Twitter.
While we wait for Hometopia, here's our games like The Sims 4 list.
After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at 12DOVE before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.