Keiran McEwen
Keiran McEwenDo I need to run down the details I’ve already covered in the preview of Sports: Renovations? A blonde woman named Jesse sees a news piece late at night and does what all women do: Try to save anything slightly dying. The news piece was about the local sports team’s arena (in this case a basketball gym) which is about to be turned into a thriving metropolis of consumerist crap, i.e. a mall. After a petition by Jesse and her partner Kit (who you seemingly play as), the gym is almost saved. You have 160-ish days to do it, and you have no money.
Taking on odd jobs here and there from others in sports-based ventures, you help renovate their rock climbing places, boxing gyms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, and otherwise, into a nicer place. How you find time to sort your own project out is a marvel only reserved for the likes of Max Black and Caroline Channing. I mean, seriously, between sex, first and second jobs, and starting a business, how did they ever get any sleep? This is a question you’ll ask yourself about Kit while you House Flipper ‘em up the world of Northern-Midwestern sports locations.
For some story-based reason, each of the venues you renovate has been messed up. In the case of the GOATS’ basketball “arena” (a high school gym), there was a supposed riot and subsequent break-in, with broken windows and crushed-up cans everywhere. Others, like the boxing gym from the demo and the indoor rock climbing gym in level two, have different reasons. The reasons were (sequentially) that an old family member died and left the gym to his granddaughter and there was a fire that ruined the climbing gym. It’s all that typical dad-sim/cleaning-up game stuff we’ve gotten used to, as stories are added to the likes of Crime Scene Cleaner and beyond.
Goat Gamez and Dear Villagers’ Sports: Renovations is very much another one of those “casual” dad-focused cleaning simulators, which this time focuses on sports, as the title would suggest. Coming in with ideas of a perfectly polished masterpiece will trip you up though, as Sports: Renovations is very much what I said in the preview: A touch janky with ideas and something unique about it. One easy example is geography. I’m all for going in on Americans finding that difficult, but Polish developer Goat Gamez has set Sports: Renovations in Illiconsin and Minnegan after the civil war between the Midwestern states seemingly.
The GOATS and The Barn (the place you’re renovating), are supposedly in “Laketown, IL, 3718 Meadows Rd,” but instead of being below Peoria and just West of Bloomington on Route 66. It is instead placed on the in-game map up by Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Just as the climbing gym is listed as in “MN” but geographically is placed by Lake Independence, MI. Not that this makes Sports: Renovations bad, I’m just setting the scene for a game that’s a tad over-written and mechanically fine, but with technicals and details that feel a bit off.
As I said in the preview, the hammer is heavy and slow, which is a bit tiring; the broom is a bit meaningless as you could kick the dirt away more effectively; and painting is a bit hit-and-miss with the surfaces it does acknowledge. The latter of which you can actually right-click at certain points and fill in the gaps anyway. Mechanically, most things are sound or at least functional. Upgrades make things like cleaning off brown marks in bathroom walls a bit easier, but not a massive power-washing-based improvement, not making them 3-in-1 style tools.
The technical side, however, is a bit more discomforting. As mentioned in the preview, you can only select presets of graphical quality, and any/all upscaling or super sampling offered in-game are for non-Nvidia cards. Thankfully, on a 40 series and i7 with 32GB of RAM, I haven’t seen many, if any, drops in FPS during gameplay, but there may be a small moment while loading a new level for whatever reason. Nonetheless, only offering presets for graphical quality is always annoying if you’re someone who can get sick from motion blur or other terrible but often forced “enhancements” to make a game look worse.
One thing that bothered me with the demo in the preview that is still here in the full release is the lack of a field-of-view slider. I don’t know if it is a restricted field-of-view, the UI being claustrophobic when the font size is set to “high,” or simply the fact I can’t control it myself. However, after a few hours of play, Sports: Renovations has been making me feel a little sick. Not violently so, but sort of motion sickness-style “something wants out of me and I’m feeling woozy.” I somewhat wrote it off for the preview, but after several hours of continuous play, that’s noticeable.
The truth is, I don’t hate Sports: Renovations, nor am I saying I’m looking past the issues. All the same, when it isn’t trying to interject and allows you to clean up and renovate, it’s pretty “fun.” Well as fun as these types of games are, given they are mostly just a vessel to listen to podcasts. There is still the focus on having Josh Skjold’s Kurt Reynolds yap about something or other. I swear I’ve heard him in some other simulator like Bus Simulator 21 or similar.
I’ll admit, I turned down the music so far it wasn’t audible anymore, and that’s because most studios and their composers know most people want to listen to their own music/podcast. Robert Purzycki’s soundtrack isn’t much different. It’s the generic whatever genre fits the moment; elevator music that is actually trying to get you to listen to it before you turn it off. I’m not trying to insult the soundtrack. I’m trying to make the point that you’ll turn that music down and find something of your own; something that you’ll need to Alt-TAB out to pause more than you should.
I believe I also said previously, though not in as many words, that Sports: Renovations is a tad over-written. Every level ends with some big project: The boxing gym is building the ring, the gridiron football stadium is painting the team names in the end zones, and the indoor wheelchair league is about building two stairlifts (why not use ramps?). Each of them talks about the history, right down to some horrible instances including the Friday Night Lights idea of dreaming to get to the NFL or a boxer dying.
Honestly, an editor would trim that down a bit, because if you know the sport then you know at least enough of the history. If you don’t, you probably don’t care enough about it for a 10-minute one-person podcast. Thankfully, you can skip the needless chatter, and I want to emphasize you because I couldn’t. Yes, I’ll “complain” about it, but honestly, I’m not going to skip it when I’m doing a review; that would be unprofessional.
What probably drew me to Sports: Renovations the most has been what I’ve recently said with The Executive. I like being around arenas, sports venues, and otherwise, in the areas you’re “not supposed to be.” There is part of me that enjoys it for that, alongside the gameplay, which once you’ve fully upgraded your tools is fine. The thing I keep coming back around to every time I’ve sat down to write even a bit of this review is that no one is going to hate it and no one is going to love it either. Sports: Renovations is just fine.
There are parts, such as the geography, that make it feel like Goat Gamez has as little interest in the project as I have in cleaning out a cat tray. It has to be done, but I’m not looking forward to it. The other major example is the opening text-to-speech program thing that I mentioned in the preview, which reads: “My company’s program will revive the derelict Laketown Goats Club into a thriving commercial and residential hub. Big changes kicking off soon!” Not only does no one speak like that, but the delivery makes it worse and shows a “We don’t care, so neither should you” attitude.
Despite its flaws, Sports: Renovations is ultimately a fine, “I like sports and the renovation genre” sort of game. It never punches too far above its weight and tries to box with the gods of House Flipper and PowerWash Simulator, but it never felt so cheap and slapdash as to put it below what PlayWay seemingly farts out with suspicious regularity. I like Sports: Renovations, but rarely for its unique points, more so the fact it’s another dad sim that does just enough to let me drift away into listening about a ridiculous man from Wigan. Which is all I want from the genre.
A PC review copy of Sports: Renovations was provided by Dear Villagers for this review.
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17 Sports: Renovations
$24.99
Pros
- Fine, solid gameplay/mechanics, but nothing too exciting.
- Solid performance.
Cons
- A bit over-written, especially the one-man history podcasts.
- A lack of FOV slider.
- A lack of individual graphical settings.
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