Taking a page out of House Flipper, Sports: Renovations has you fixing football fields and repairing hockey rinks.
The cosy dad game genre, as I’m referring to it now, has become very popular. Differing from cosy games like Coffee Talk and Stardew Valley, these games tend to focus on DIY-centric activities like power washing, building computers, or repairing houses. I have quite a soft spot for a lot of them and can sink hours into a good one. Sports: Renovations certainly isn’t the greatest amongst the genre, but it’s entertaining enough and has enough fun little features to keep me coming back to reach the end of the story.
Yes, there’s a story to this one, which feels pretty odd considering the genre, but I won’t complain. In short, your local basketball team’s stadium is going to be demolished and turned into a shopping mall unless you and you alone can manage to renovate it to a standard that city inspectors will accept. Cue you setting out to different sports venues around the city to repair them so you can earn enough money to save the basketball centre. It’s practically an 80s movie plot.
There’s not a lot to the story, which is fine as these games tend to be mechanically driven, and the mechanics here are fun enough to keep my attention. Regardless of whether you’re repairing your stadium or fixing up a golf course, you tend to be doing the same things. You’ll clean up rubbish, break up junk items, repaint walls, and powerwash dirt. As is often the case, this sounds like it could get tedious, but the gradual improvement of the area you’re working on means you constantly feel like you’re making a little more progress every time you do something small, and it’s as satisfying here as it is in so many in the odd little sub-genre.
I will grant that some elements are a little more annoying than others. Having to throw so many objects into skips gets quite tiresome, especially when there’s a walk to the nearest one. The sweeping is a little finicky too, sometimes just moving dirt around rather than actually clearing it up. The individual systems here don’t feel quite as refined as in House Flipper which is the clear inspiration, but they’re still fun and kept me engaged, giving me that “one more turn” feeling that can cause you to lose hours at a time.
Much like in its inspiration, in Sports: Renovations you’ll need to buy furniture that’s mostly sports related to equip parts of your stadium and the other centres you’re working on. This quickly becomes a bit pointless to my mind, as you earn so much money so quickly that you might as well buy all the most expensive equipment and not worry about anything. In fact, I’d earned enough to unlock and renovate every area in the stadium after two jobs which felt a bit odd. Still, there are other events that occur that mean you still need to work on your home turf even after that point.
What I did quite like was the variety of different areas you’d go to. Whilst you’ll still be doing the same thing, much like in Powerwash Simulator, a change of venue can keep things feeling fresh. Starting out with a boxing gym, you’ll quickly visit climbing centres, ice hockey rinks, and even a wheelchair American Football club. Each of them have their own little feature to make them stand out, such as needing to clean the ice at the hockey rink or replace the video screens at the virtual golf centre. What I especially liked was the radio presenter who would pop up and give you some history on different sports, which was certainly unique.
The voice work is a little off though, and I was wondering if they were AI generated. Some of the dialogue and accents felt borderline offensive, especially the Irish lady in the boxing gym which is quite the stereotype alone. There’s some nice music at least, and the visuals are solid if not especially standout. The frame rate did tend to take an inexplicable hit from time to time though, and whilst my PC isn’t the powerhouse it once was, it can throw Space Marine 2 around without a care in the world, so this shouldn’t cause it to struggle.
Those minor gripes aside, Sports: Renovations is a fun addition to the genre, and whilst there are better options out there, I don’t think there are any with this specific theme that execute the basic mechanics well. I appreciate that this may be something of a niche game within a niche genre, but there will likely be an audience for it, and those who are in that Venn diagram intersection can buy this confidently knowing that they’ll have fun.
Sports: Renovations is available now on PC.
