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Genre: Game - Arcade Action

Developer: Big Fish Games

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X, 400MHz G3, 128MB RAM

Price: $19.99

Demo: Available

In Flip or Flop Home Edition, you find yourself bereft of your grandmother’s mansion, which by all family rights should be yours, and which was taken out from under your family's collective noses. No doubt, unscrupulous realtors and home flippers are to blame. What to do? Join their ranks!

In this mildly addictive tile game, you progress through four levels of home-flipping expertise. You start as a beginner, purchasing homes in the worst parts of town. You improve the houses by participating in a tile game where you attempt to align three or more tiles representing necessary repairs: doors, lights, paint, trim, and so on. You lay out a modest down payment to enter the boards, which consist of grids everywhere from a simple 5x5 board to larger and more complex 8x8 and beyond. As you eliminate tiles, you work against a checklist of each item listed at the bottom. While you lay out modest amounts for each repair, you sell the house when time runs out. Each match costs a small sum. Your repairs return a healthy profit, depending on how much work you are able to complete. While you do not have to fully match out every item on the board, completing the house maximizes your profit.

Switching out tiles is not just a mix and match affair. You can only manipulate a row or column by pushing it. Rows can be pushed to the right one square by use of an arrow at the left, and can be pushed left by an arrow at the right. Columns can be bumped up from below, or pushed down from above. In every case, the tile "pushed" off the other side reappears in the vacated spot from which you pushed. This can make for some interesting and hard to spot matches along the sides, top and bottom. With a mouse, pushing the rows and columns was relatively simple, but the touch pad was difficult to master and sometimes affected the speed with which rows could be moved. For each match you make, some additional time is added, and, if you work quickly enough, you can earn a healthy time bonus on top of the home sale profit. If after a few seconds you have not found a match, an arrow glows yellow to suggest a move. However, by this time the move will not add enough to compensate for the lost time, so you can't rely on this feature to do the work for you.

Once you have progressed through a house and time expires, the house is resold for a profit that depends largely on the neighborhood in which you are working and the amount of repairs you were able to complete. Once you have fixed up a few houses in a poorer neighborhood, you are able to enter more affluent neighborhoods. Here, the concept remains the same, except the grids are generally larger, and more tasks need to be completed before time runs out and the house is resold. You progress through four levels of neighborhoods, continually re-investing your profits, until you earn sufficient funds to complete the task.

Gameplay in Flip or Flop Home Edition is rather straightforward. There is good progression value—the game became continually more difficult without becoming impossible. There was certainly no concern that just an hour's worth of gaming would allow you to progress through to the end. Flip or Flop Home Edition is a decent value and another strong addition to the popular games at Big Fish.

Download the free demo.