A man of sports, I am not. Watching it is boring. Playing it? I’m outta my league! But I like doing chores and getting paid to do so is even better. Gaming has seen a rise of “cleaning” simulation titles where players take on big jobs, filled to the brim with grime and slop, and wash and clean stuff up meticulously until the game says that they’re done. And developer Goat Gamez’s latest title ‘Sports: Renovations’ is another drop in the bucket, all though this time with a sports flair and more of an emphasis on story telling.
Published by Dear Villagers, Sports: Renovation has players take on the role of an unspecified person, who has returned to their hometown Laketown, IL (not to be confused with Chicago’s Lake View!), where a basketball stadium of yore is due to be glassed and turned into a mall. We seem to have fond memories of this place as noted by our assistant, who will be helping us tidy up the stadium and earning the funds we need to buy the needed upgrades and repairs to prove to the city’s inspectors that the city’s Goats are still in business.
Wait, we’re doing this all on our own? Our assistant is just going to sit there? Oh. Okay then!
Sports: Renovations will have players fix up their stadium all the while taking on other jobs on the side to pay for the damages. It’s a traditional level-based system with some story beats sprinkled in between. But what the developer has brought to the table here is a massive emphasis on sports history and the people involved in them. Every location you visit that isn’t the Goats’ stadium is a beat up, run down former fitness or sports centre of sorts. The first being a garage-based boxing setup, where Irish boxers duked it out against all odds to rise up from the underground to the big leagues.
Here, we get a look at all the tools at our disposal: we have rubbish bags, a washing tool, a paint brush, crowbar, and some other tool or two that is slipping my mind. Each one is easy to use and the game will tell you what to use at a given time through tooltips. Not all locations will have you use every tool, however, but you’ll almost always be picking up garbage or sweeping the floor. It all works well, mostly anyway (I’ll touch on that in a moment), so put on headphones and clean away!
Cleaning up these old beat-up venues can take a while and part of that is because sometimes, finding the next objective the game wants you to take care of can be a bit difficult. See, you can smash a “detective vision” pulse of sorts a couple of times to highlight areas or bits of rubbish that need to be picked up, but these outlines are often hard to see and a lot of the time I did end up spending more time than I should have combing through areas over and over again just to proceed. The user interface is a tad clumsy as well, especially when you need to pull up the “store” application on your tablet multiple times to complete furnishing objectives—these ones were annoying as the game mixes up furniture, electronics, and weight equipment in one tab when it’s clear the UI supports multiple and could separate everything into categories proper!
While I’m at it, I’d like to let you know, my dear reader, that I hate painting. Childhood trauma really—spending hours of my life trying to help my dad paint walls with what I could only consider some of the worst paintbrushes in the world. That sort of stuff stays with you, and I hate doing it just as much in this game. What makes painting worse in Sports: Renovations is that completing this objective can vary in intensity between levels. One level might let you get away with not painting every bit of surface while some of the later levels require every inch be covered in paint. I had spent multiple minutes repainting surfaces over and over again at times just to be able to progress (this was particularly bad in the American football stage).
All these issues added up to make for a clumsy experience at times. Nothing game breaking, but it does meddle in what should otherwise be a calming sort of game. It does that part quite well actually, one of the reasons I took a week and a half to finish it was because I’d fall asleep halfway into a job.
But I really do like the sports aspect of the game a lot, even if I was primarily listening to my own music while cleaning up the place. As you complete your tasks, you’ll receive some voice comms from the people who have hired you for the job and they’ll comment on the various rooms and things you’re doing from time to time. No idea how they’re able to see what I’m doing as I’m the only one in these places by the way, but let’s not sweat the finer details. You’ll hear everything about the people you’re helping and learn more about the particular sport that venue was tied to, including factoids littered about that are either recent stuffs or old school cool.
Now I don’t truly know if any of said lore bits of Sports: Renovations are real, but they do seem to be based on real-world events and traditions. It was cool to learn about Soviet swimmers as it was to see both wheelchair sports and women’s baseball leagues highlighted, as I put together equipment needed for their particular work. Alongside the people who have hired you to fix up their arenas, you’ll also hear a fictional midwestern states radio host that goes by the name of Kurt, who will fill you in with more history details of the sport, as you go about doing the mundane. I appreciate the push for authenticity as it engaged me into a field of challenge and struggle that I otherwise do not care for.
The game’s overarching narrative is surprisingly impactful as well, despite not being much of a “focal point” so to speak. You’re working your way from rock bottom to the point that even a piece of your equipment will outright fail on you early on in the game. Honestly, that was one of the more memorable moments of the game to me. I thought I had broken something when in turn, it was actually the game telling me that the busy work was only getting started. We also have a construction company breathing down our necks a bit, hoping we fail the inspection so that our basketball stadium is demolished for a mall. Yes, this game has two different endings, but I assure you it’s impossible to get the bad one unless you don’t do anything to change its fate.
All though I’m going to have to say this: very few of the locations actually look like the Midwest. Good try, Goat Gamez, but I wanted to let you know that Michigan does not have mountains. It’s all hills and flatland around these parts.
Sports: Renovation is a cool take on the cleaning simulation genre. Its love for sports emanates in just about every corner of the game, across multiple levels. It can be clumsy at times, but it’ll eat up your time like no tomorrow. Put on some headphones, learn about sports, and scrub those venue floors clean. ∎
Sports: Renovations
Played on
Windows 11 PC
PROS
- Good progression system with a number of levels and tools.
- Cool sports factoids based on real life (I presume so, anyway).
- Story is light but has a few neat moments.
- Differing endings is a nice touch.
CONS
- User interface is clumsy, particularly the shop menu.
- Some progression requirements are inconsistent with regards to how much of the work should be completed.
- It can be difficult to find objectives at times.
- I hate painting.
