Your quintessential construction simulator is here. Take a dodgy loan, restore a property, move in the locals, attend to their grievances, then celebrate with a pint in this fully-simulated, open-world 1980's Britain.
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Steam achievement completion rates for Landlord's Super are particularly damning; just 18% of people have placed their first brick. For a construction simulator, placing just a brick seems awfully quintessential to the experience. Why is it that so many fail to even reach the literal building blocks of building?
When the job centre's got you down
And your face is full of frowns
Come and have a lovely frothy creamy pint of
Landlord's Super
From the word go; an admittedly catchy theme song aggressively leads into notice of debt. It lends itself nor the player any favors as it fails to explain much of anything. The depressing sight of a mobile home boxes you in and you figure out sooner how to unzip your pants and whiz on the wall before opening a menu - though it isn't as funny here as it was in Postal 2. You spend the next hour after being told to head to the local town meandering around trash decorated wilderness with no map - made nervous by the disorientation that comes with branching roads, and though they all lead to the same place you have no way of knowing this yet - before crashing into a town and finding the tutorial man a second time. He tells you to collect scrap for cash, and more notably he tells you this is the only way to earn with agency for now. Morally dubious heavy lifting is rewarded with a promise of money tomorrow, and you hope that it is enough to begin the game. You find your way home and the next day you feel betrayed by the pitiful pocket change granted to you.
This is the moment it becomes apparent that reaching a cashflow in which you can actually begin playing Landlord's Super is the difficult part, with no promise of fun to come after. Unapologetically does the game make you slog through the numbing tedium of transportation for nickels on the dime when the tools to work are comparatively for the bluest of blood only. Desperately seeking cash culminates into an inevitable tipping point where you become a cog in the machine who wakes up and drags itself to town only to wash dishes in a glorified time skip menu for nine hours out of your day, going home for the express purpose of doing it again the next.
Yet there is some catharsis as you learn the lay of the land; the world oozes charm in its attention to detail. I was captivated in some part by the way your surroundings interact with you, though only just enough to help me push through the quicksand of an early game. It grows stale once you realize the contents of the game world are so shallow and bite-sized, but it is exciting when it is still new. Maybe it's strange to say I craved more world building and NPC interaction from a construction simulator, but I consider this the key selling point that makes it stand out against contemporaries.
Graciously there does come a point where you can actually achieve laying the first brick. At this point the game is mostly fine. It's not a clean game by any means - bugs and jank will interfere maliciously as you realize they eat your precious money with the vanishing or breaking of items - but it scratches a certain primordial itch to create and puzzle solve. Monetary issues are mostly resolved by selling your first house instead of renting it, at which point the earning tedium is discarded for a sandbox approach hindered only by the at times frustrating limitations of bulk purchases.
Landlord's Super is strangely a game I respect, though negatively personified in its mocking of the quality of life features it lacks through its boasting of passionate attention to detail. There is a pit in my brain that is filled neatly with the perfect ratios for concrete and the process of building scaffolding after my time spent on an in-game year. It is a focused and thorough game, if nothing else, but lacks regard for what makes a game fun at many points in pursuit of its particular shade of quasi-realism.
For the right type of person I believe this game works perfectly, I was only lucky I was in that category. Approach with caution.
P.S. A tip for anyone reading this who plans to play or is playing already and finds themselves frustrated with cashflow; I'd recommend getting good at the slot machine in the bar. It's worth your while if you can cash out, my first payout was $200 bucks for just a few in-game hours of playing and I was set. Definitely saved me a lot of time and sanity on the less than interesting dish-washing grind.
When the job centre's got you down
And your face is full of frowns
Come and have a lovely frothy creamy pint of
Landlord's Super
From the word go; an admittedly catchy theme song aggressively leads into notice of debt. It lends itself nor the player any favors as it fails to explain much of anything. The depressing sight of a mobile home boxes you in and you figure out sooner how to unzip your pants and whiz on the wall before opening a menu - though it isn't as funny here as it was in Postal 2. You spend the next hour after being told to head to the local town meandering around trash decorated wilderness with no map - made nervous by the disorientation that comes with branching roads, and though they all lead to the same place you have no way of knowing this yet - before crashing into a town and finding the tutorial man a second time. He tells you to collect scrap for cash, and more notably he tells you this is the only way to earn with agency for now. Morally dubious heavy lifting is rewarded with a promise of money tomorrow, and you hope that it is enough to begin the game. You find your way home and the next day you feel betrayed by the pitiful pocket change granted to you.
This is the moment it becomes apparent that reaching a cashflow in which you can actually begin playing Landlord's Super is the difficult part, with no promise of fun to come after. Unapologetically does the game make you slog through the numbing tedium of transportation for nickels on the dime when the tools to work are comparatively for the bluest of blood only. Desperately seeking cash culminates into an inevitable tipping point where you become a cog in the machine who wakes up and drags itself to town only to wash dishes in a glorified time skip menu for nine hours out of your day, going home for the express purpose of doing it again the next.
Yet there is some catharsis as you learn the lay of the land; the world oozes charm in its attention to detail. I was captivated in some part by the way your surroundings interact with you, though only just enough to help me push through the quicksand of an early game. It grows stale once you realize the contents of the game world are so shallow and bite-sized, but it is exciting when it is still new. Maybe it's strange to say I craved more world building and NPC interaction from a construction simulator, but I consider this the key selling point that makes it stand out against contemporaries.
Graciously there does come a point where you can actually achieve laying the first brick. At this point the game is mostly fine. It's not a clean game by any means - bugs and jank will interfere maliciously as you realize they eat your precious money with the vanishing or breaking of items - but it scratches a certain primordial itch to create and puzzle solve. Monetary issues are mostly resolved by selling your first house instead of renting it, at which point the earning tedium is discarded for a sandbox approach hindered only by the at times frustrating limitations of bulk purchases.
Landlord's Super is strangely a game I respect, though negatively personified in its mocking of the quality of life features it lacks through its boasting of passionate attention to detail. There is a pit in my brain that is filled neatly with the perfect ratios for concrete and the process of building scaffolding after my time spent on an in-game year. It is a focused and thorough game, if nothing else, but lacks regard for what makes a game fun at many points in pursuit of its particular shade of quasi-realism.
For the right type of person I believe this game works perfectly, I was only lucky I was in that category. Approach with caution.
P.S. A tip for anyone reading this who plans to play or is playing already and finds themselves frustrated with cashflow; I'd recommend getting good at the slot machine in the bar. It's worth your while if you can cash out, my first payout was $200 bucks for just a few in-game hours of playing and I was set. Definitely saved me a lot of time and sanity on the less than interesting dish-washing grind.
Excellent addition to the dad game genre. The perfect level of complexity so as not to get tiring, but not be too simple. Unfortunately, while the game does go for a charming lack of direction, a few design choices lead to confusing unexplained roadblocks that then require discussion board research to solve.