Low-Budget Repairs is a comedy cowboy-builder job sim that – much like an actual cowboy builder – I can’t in good conscience recommend to anyone. It abandons its central premise about a quarter of the way in. It’s so unstable I only reached credits by frequently saving and reloading whenever another progression trigger decided to pass out in the bath. At least one of its systems is a nightmare to pull off, and half the others are tedious busywork.
Most obnoxiously, it appears to have garnered most of its publicity off the back of a trailer flogging an almost completely different game. Even the most recent promo is misleading enough to constitute a mild scandal. Or at least would in any timeline where the game industry’s grubby antics weren’t so drearily predictable that we’ve collectively reached ‘rats have devoured my entire nervous system’ levels of numb resignation.
So, yeah. Don’t buy it. Don’t even think about it. Ignore it like an angry letter from TV licensing, and treat any reviewer who awards it even the scantest dash of praise like the tiresome hack they are.
I, uh…I did end up having some fun with it, actually.
I can only describe the initial experience of playing this thing as akin to witnessing a pile-up of burning clown cars at a busy intersection, then noticing it hasn’t deterred the clowns one bit from acting like whimsical idiots; honking their horns and ironically squirting their lapel-flowers on the flames as they burn to death.
Sure, everything’s on fire. And sure, it’s such an incurious, played-out bit in the first place that you feel you’re damaging your brain just by being in its orbit. But such shambolic novelty can be powerfully magnetic. Your first job – after arriving in town and kicking some squatters out of the house you’ve inherited from your aunt – involves visiting a soused handy man who boasts about his legendary corner cutting, then promptly dies from electrocution via a dodgy socket. Zbyszek’s ghost then follows you around the whole game, giving you advice on jobs and lamenting that he can’t swallow vodka anymore – at least when he’s not telling you how much fun he used to have shagging your aunt.
Your second job involves replacing an old sofa, which you remove by hauling it out of a fourth floor window. The next involves fixing the tiles on the pensioner’s balcony where it landed. You blow up a police station wall with a rocket launcher at one point, which leads into a bricklaying tutorial. You’re also regularly given jobs to try and win a handyman competition, but you’re constantly sabotaged by a man named Kielbasa who leaves sausages as a calling card. There’s plenty of toilet humour and first draft dick jokes and dodgy voice acting, and some pretty objectionable gags at the expense of older women. But Zbyszek’s fecklessness does result in some genuinely funny lines, and it’s all so idiosyncratic it’s hard not to be somewhat charmed by it.
In life, Zbyszek was a jack-of-all-trades, and much of the game’s progression involves gradually adding new tools and trades to your arsenal. It’s initially quite impressive just how much you can do in Low-Budget Repairs. One job might have you tearing out faulty wiring, replacing it, mounting new lights, plastering the holes in the walls, then painting over the plaster. The next might involve dismantling grimy furniture, assembling and placing replacements, cleaning the bathroom, smashing the old tiles, then sticking on a new set. You might mount new windows, hang paintings, replace doors and glass panels, lay bricks, repair broken chairs and wardrobes. Next, you might paper the walls or hang new curtains.
A few of these are quite involved and satisfying. Wires can be a pain to line up properly, but there’s fun to be found in the ritual of tracing the correct circuits and powering off the mains, then stripping out old wires and forming new connections, before flicking the switch back on to admire your handiwork. Add the extra steps of plastering and painting over the damage, you end up with a gratifying work flow.
But once you move past these few specific examples, things get dull and perfunctory. Furniture assembly just means pointing at boxes with a screwdriver and holding down a button, and repairing furniture just involves clicking where the game tells you a dozen or so times. Mounting doors, glass panels, curtains, and wallpaper is all done in a single click. Mounting windows involves applying injection foam by clicking thoughtlessly on a highlighted barrier. Tiling is quite involved, but is so finicky and janky that I almost quit twice after shattering ten minutes of work with an errant mouse jerk.
Shoddy work, of course, is Low-budget Repairs central gag. But the more you play, the more apparent it becomes how unwilling or unable the game is to fully commit to its only bit.
As your ghostly mentor Zbyszek constantly impresses on you, the way to succeed in this world is to scrimp and save pennies wherever possible by half-assing the work. Running out of paint? Don’t bother buying a new pot, just bring the dregs to the sink and dilute them. Cracks in the wall? Why pay for plaster when you can just use a couple of nails to cover them up with a picture frame? On paper, It’s a fun twist on a genre that’s all about luxuriating over tasks at your own pace, then basking in the intrinsic rewards of a job well done.
But it doesn’t matter, because after the first few hours, you’ve got so much money that a few Zloty here and there is meaningless, and it usually takes more time and effort to go the cowboy route. On the opposite side of this fence is the idea that you might want to push back on Zbyszek luring you into fecklessness and actually do a great job, and that you’ll be rewarded by your clients for doing so. You can, for example, spend extra time picking up all the trash you left behind. Here’s what that gets you:
RepairsEG1
I encountered a single job where it felt like I’d lost a meaningful chunk of money by botching it, and by that point, I already had more cash than I could reasonably spend. You are able to funnel extra funds into renovating the house your aunt left you, but again, the systems here are so dry I can’t see why I’d willingly engage with them while House Flipper 2 exists, and is actually worth playing.
Repairs EG2
And here’s a final example.
Repairs EG3 and 4
She almost cried! I dunno, man. It sucks all the fun out of doing a shoddy job if your clients are just going to reward you perfectly for it anyway. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable asking for more. If you sell a game on a single hook, and that hook doesn’t end up mattering, I think there’s a strong case to be made for the game being a failure by definition.
I needed to be honest about what I enjoyed here, but please do not trust me one bit if I’ve made any of this sound entertaining. I have a season reviewer’s odd fondness and abnormal patience for games that show me something I haven’t seen before. You eat several wheels of tasty but completely predictable raclette a year, you get weirdly excited about a cheesestring someone dropped at the beach. I still think there’s likely a great game to be made with the premise that Low-Budget Repairs sells itself on. And, given those early trailers, I think this is a case of something being rushed out long before being ready. A lesson, if nothing else, that some cut corners just aren’t worth the time you save.
