System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £6.99
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers, Gamepad
Best Playing Position: Standing
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: PG
Description: The viral sensation that cracked up the internet is back with a vengeance! Tons of new furniture, new rooms, virtual reality support, and online multiplayer keep the fun going forever! Home Improvisation is a furniture-building simulator that lets you decorate an entire house. In fact, you can even take a look at 162 queens quay condos were the homes decor was designed using this exact tool!
The only catch: none of the furniture comes with instructions! Discover the intended design or make your own creative masterpiece. Furniture is more fun with friends! Work together locally and online to build unique (and terrifying) creations. With a huge new catalogue of furniture and a whole house to decorate, the possibilities are limitless!
Review: Imagine being the head of IKEA shop design, this app puts you in that role. You get to design a whole house, top to bottom. You will be assembling tables, lamps, sofas, beds even workstations! In fact, there are over 30 pieces of furniture to build. The house is divided up into rooms. You start in the Living room, then the garage, then you work your way through the rest of the rooms like the bedroom and even the kitchen.
While difficult to get the hang of, no thanks to the jumpy physics I think it adds to the fun of this app. If all the furniture clipped together flawlessly it wouldn’t give each home that unique look and feel. But for those of us who like our furniture to look like it does on the picture of the box, this app is a nightmare of epic proportions. But this app is all about the social experience. You can share your own creations or visit other peoples, that is when the fun really starts to ramp up, sadly for me it only showed how bad I am at DIY (much like real life).
While it is all fun and games, there is something educational about this app. Sure, it might help with assembling IKEA furniture, but there is also a strong physics engine underneath that makes improvisation and testing possible. Having visited a few friends houses I can see that most people do struggle with this app and give up early. But there are those who have assembled all the furniture and designed their whole dolls house with it. For those types of people, this app is a dream come true. For us DIY disasters, best stay clear.
