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By Al  Players: 1 Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam We've all seen those types of games on various platforms during our time as gamers: the "_____ Simulator" games. Electrician Simulator is one of those of course, and it seeks to put you into the shoes of an electrician. It's developed by Take IT Studio!, who have also brought us Car Mechanic Simulator and Thief Simulator. It recently got a new DLC update (titled "Smart Devices"), and in honor of that update, we'll be taking a look at it on the Nintendo Switch. While that's the platform I'll be playing it on, it's currently available on just about every major platform to speak of, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting your hands on it if you so desire. Do you desire that though? Well, let's take a look at the game and find out!
Electrician Simulator sees you start up your very own electric company, and get to work making money from your local neighborhood's various electric needs. You can pick your logo and company name, and just dive right into things. You'll have to learn the tricks of the trade first of course, and that means you'll have to complete a series of VR tutorials. Each level of tutorials allow you to perform various tasks, but you'll complete them all within an hour or two of your time with the game. Your goal is to work your way up the ladder to becoming the best electrician in the area, or just create a lot of electricity-related havoc, the choice is yours. You'll notice that you have some RPG-like mechanics like money, a reputation level, and an inventory, most of this is self-explanatory, but we'll go over things in more detail now. Money is mainly used to buy things you'll need to complete jobs as those aren't directly provided to you. This items could be lightbulbs, outlets, fixtures, wires, tools, and so on. For the purposes of performing jobs, reputation level unlocks additional items for purchase in the in-game shop. Your inventory contains all the items you've purchased, picked up from job houses, or have left over from previously completed jobs. Each job comes to you by way of email, and you usually have a few to select from. Each email mentions the tasks, the story behind the job, and even what items you'll probably want on hand. You can actually head to a job without getting the items needed/requested, but you don't always have the option to buy them once you're on-site. Once you choose one, you then head to the job site via your conveniently parked truck. Some jobs have big payouts upon completion, but it's often these that require a big up-front cost to get the items needed to properly complete them. It's best to always have a nest egg available so you can purchase necessary items, otherwise you might lock yourself out of completing some of the higher-end jobs. Naturally you can complete a job in an unsatisfactory manner, but that will affect the experience and money gained from completing it.
I bet you're wondering what exactly does an electrician does. I'm willing to bet that a real-life electrician does a lot more than what they do in this game, but let's go over what a job entails in Electrician Simulator. Within the confines of the game world, and electrician fixes wiring, installs everything electric, and even install or change lightbulbs. They can also get some work-from-home jobs where customers send in broken electronics to be fixed. I'll cover the second type of job first because they're really fairly simple to explain. Some emails have a special marking that indicate that they're workshop jobs, and when these are accepted items will immediately appear on your workshop desk to work on. You then disassemble these (while using items you have to specially purchase for these jobs only), see what's wrong with the item, fix whatever the issue is, reassemble them, and then send them back to the customer. Thanks to a lot of rusty screws (Seriously, why are so many of them rusty?), lots of soldering, and re-buying broken chips or parts, you'll often find that you're paying a lot out of pocket for each of these jobs you take on. Since these most like have lower payouts than on-location jobs, you only make a few dollars on each of them, or might even see yourself lose money if you're not careful with replacing something over fixing it. That means you're pretty much only doing these jobs for the reputation, but they're usually fun enough that you might not mind doing them for practically nothing. I know I came to particularly enjoy them. Also, the workbench was decorated for Christmas during my entire playthrough, and I'm here for that kind of thing.
On-location jobs are usually more complicated than workshop jobs and often involve the tasks you were probably expecting when you signed up to become an electrician. Let's start with the simple tasks and work our way up. Changing lightbulbs is self-explanatory, and just about the only thing you can do in a step or two. Any other task requires that you first find the fuse box and turn off the power. Sometimes you'll have to turn off power selectively, such as if it's a night job and you need some light to work by, but you can often get away turning off the main breaker for all your jobs. Fixing light switches and power outlets is probably what you'll be doing the most in this game, and they require simple disassembly and a bit of rewiring. The rewiring actually had me really confused at first since I didn't realize that the tutorials were little videos that you were supposed to be watching. Eventually trial and error eventually helped me figure out what wires were supposed to go where, and thankfully it's always the same pattern for jobs that require that kind of work. Speaking of wires, the next common task you'll be facing deals with running wires to new outlets or switches, or even connecting existing ones to new lighting fixtures or electronics. This is done by laying spare wire along a series of angles until you reach whatever it is you're trying to get power to. There is no real punishment for going at it however you want, ugly as it may be, but I found it better to lay them out in as straight a line as possible as it looks terrible to see them in the wire detection view otherwise. You can also add new breakers to the circuit box if you're completely installing all the electric stuff to any one particular space. This is usually followed by the wiring of individual outlets and switches, but by the time you're laying complex wiring, you'll have the other tasks down to a science. That's honestly just about all there is to the actual electric parts of your job, but there's a few more things you'll be doing.
Sort of related to laying wiring, and fixing outlets and switches, is the placement of electronic items and fixtures. These can also be placed in any particular way, and even moved after being placed the first time, but it's best to open the menu that allows you to line things up perfectly to each other on a grid of sorts. If you're placing something like a lighting fixture, or a ceiling fan, you're going to have to hook that up to power using the wiring mentioned before, but in the case of further switches, outlets, or fixtures, you can daisy chain them along a continuous string of power instead of rewiring them to a different breaker. Other electronic items, like TVs, lamps, etc., often have to be plugged in for jobs to be completed and this is usually done by simply plugging them to into an outlet. If the outlet is too far away, or occupied by something else, you can either create a new outlet (not always an option), or you can add an extension cord. Most jobs will require you to turn everything on to make sure that everything is actually working, but I guess that should be expected I guess. Oh, and now is as good a time as any to mention that this game uses UK outlets that look absolute wild when compared to a US one. Besides things specific to each job, like bringing specific items to a job, placing an exact number of outlets, or using a particular color of lightbulb, that's pretty much everything you'll be doing within Electrician Simulator. A simple bunch of tasks, but they have enough variety within them that you probably won't notice the repetition for a while. Oh, and you'll be earning money and gaining levels along the way. Besides what I mentioned already, the former can also be used to make your home better and more decorated, and the latter will make more jobs available to you.
One thing that I loved about Electrician Simulator is the stories behind each of the jobs in the game. Changing lightbulbs and fixing game controllers is whatever in the grand scheme of things, but this game gives you reasons to be taking on these jobs. Each of the broken items has a silly enough story behind them that I almost don't mind that they usually cost me more to fix them than I earned from the job. I quickly found that I didn't care as much about changing light bulbs for a random old man if his emails to me made it obvious that he didn't understand a thing about technology of any kind. And some jobs have all sorts of craziness that's hard to describe without seeing them in-game. I don't even know where to begin with some of them. Now, I don't want to explain them all, since I think the shock of reading them and going "WTF?!" internally is half the fun, but I'll highlight two jobs that happen very early on that really drew me in. First up you get a job to remove all the light bulbs and to break the light fixtures within a home. Seems like an odd job, but we're getting paid, so let's go. A note in the email says to ignore any odd furniture as they've just moved from Romania, also weird, but okay. Then you get there, see coffins in all the bedrooms, bats decorations here and there, and realize that this is a house of vampires. Then, a few jobs later, you get an email from someone saying that he just returned home from vacation only to find that all his light bulbs were missing, his light fixtures broken, and he had to chase out some weird bats. You get to the job and... IT'S THE SAME HOUSE! Like that entire sequence of events was just so ridiculously funny that it made me forget that the game is quite a bit on the janky side. Oh, in case you're wondering, there are a lot of jobs like that in this game. It really makes going through otherwise repetitive tasks fun.
No one really plays these type of games for their graphics, and I think you can get a quick view of everything the game offers visually from just a few screenshots, but let's talk about them for a bit. There's nothing here that'll impress anyone, and a lot of the models have that store-bought asset feel to them, but I liked the little touches here and there that made the game stand out. There's a lot of character to some of the houses, and I found the seasonal jobs and decorations very surprising. I'd have written this off as boring visually if not for these things. It's weird to say that a game like this has atmospheric storytelling, but it really does. Also, since it's not pushing any of the platforms it’s on to their graphical limits, it runs smoothly in just about all situations. Like I said at the start of this review, I played this game on the Nintendo Switch, and I didn't notice any issues while playing. Sometimes a transition would stutter in a loading screen, but I'm sure that had more to do with the actual loading of data than anything else. I did experience one game crash, but it happened so randomly in my over dozen hours of gameplay that I'm willing to accept that it may have been a random freak occurrence. Simply put, Electrician Simulator isn't exactly a beautiful game, but I'm willing to cut it some slack in this department simply due to its charm. While I went a bit easy on the game's graphics, I can't really do the same for its music. I honestly wonder if any music used in this game was created specifically for Electrician Simulator, as there seems to be no cohesion within the soundtrack itself. These kind of games usually have a chill soundtrack of sorts, but that's not really what you have here. Due to the mostly empty world, I joked here and there that this felt like a horror game while I was playing. What's funny about that thought is that some of the music actually reflects that. However, the thing is that the spooky music will just play randomly here and there, with no relation to what's happening on-screen. Sometimes the music will be elevator muzak, sometimes it'll be spooky and atmospheric, other times still it'll be upbeat, and occasionally there'll be music that really stretches the concept of "music" in general. I'm not too familiar with this developer, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of the music here has been taken from other games they've worked on. If not that, the soundtrack feels so cobbled together that I'd think the developers just chose the most readily available library music they could get. I have to admit that a few tracks aside, most of the music isn't all that bad. It just doesn't fit this game much at all. I don't want to make it sound like I think this entire game was a lazily tossed together release, but the music kind of had me thinking that throughout my entire time with it. I might be going a bit too hard here, but a little more care in the soundtrack would've really helped the game by leaps and bounds.
I think I made it clear that I was not a fan of the music, but there was something that I was even less a fan of: the controls. Now there's a lot to talk about here, but the biggest issue is that this control scheme seems like it belongs to an entirely different game. Why does this game have a jump button? And why is it the A Button? I don't know if this control scheme belongs to a game engine that Electrician Simulator is just built on top of, but you can run, dash, and crouch, none of which you'd think you'd be able to do if you saw this game's trailer. While I guess there may be reasons you'll want to crouch in a game like this, there is no reason for the rest to exist. Also, the fact that they're mapped in a style reminiscent of first-person shooters makes me believe that this is just a reused engine. Most of the action is done with the shoulder buttons, except for the many times A becomes an action button used for stuff beyond jumping, and that just leans more into my theory of a reused FPS engine. Lastly, I could never get the aiming reticle to be to my liking. Its sensitivity seems to vary depending on what it is you're doing, and no amount of playing with the settings could get it to not be at least a little wonky at all times. This isn't helped by the fact that some actions/items have the tiniest of clickable windows. I wanted to quit more than once when I had to hunt down specific pixels when I needed to interact with a screw hole or a soldering point. You kind of get used to everything after a while, but that's no reason to just accept poorly executed controls. If you're looking for a game that offers a lot of content, then you'll be pleased to learn that Electrician Simulator delivers on that front. There's dozens of jobs to complete, both workshop and on-site, and you can return to jobs if want to redo them for whatever reason. You can also use money to buy better equipment for the slightest of upgrades to gameplay, and to buy new decorations for your house. Some of the latter are evenly limited by season. These are all nice touches that show a level of detail that's not present in some other aspects of the game. There's even an Endless Mode that gives you procedurally generated stages that is essentially something of a Sandbox Mode. It's fun to mess around with, and along with doing badly at previously completed jobs, offers a nice respite from the core experience. There's also that recently released paid DLC pack I mentioned at the beginning, but I have yet to play it. Its price does seem a little high at $24.99, but it does go on sale frequently from the look of things. That said, I think a $19.99 price point (or even less) would've suited a game like this a bit better. It does have a lot of content for its price tag though, if this is the kind of gameplay you're looking for at least.
Recommending Electrician Simulator to casual gamers comes with more caveats than I usually have in my reviews. I found the gameplay mildly addicting, and usually would only stop playing when the controls or odd music choices started to get to me. Once the immersion was broken I quickly realized that I was doing the same 4-5 things over and over again. I guess that could be said about any game, but it's something to think about if you're considering picking this one up. If you're a fan of these types of Simulator games, you're probably going to want to pick it up since it does have a lot of unique gameplay elements you won't find in other games. If you're new to the genre (if one could even call it that), then you might want to wait to grab this one if it gets a decent discount. It's not a bad game, and I do recommend grabbing it if you're looking for a casual experience, you just have to set your expectations correctly, and maybe have a bit more patience than I did. Now, maybe I'll check out that DLC... Check Out Electrician Simulator on Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/electrician-simulator-switch/ Story: A (The stories behind the jobs are pretty wild!) Gameplay: C Graphics: B Music/Sound: C Value: C Overall: C+ Pros: + Can be a fun and chill experience for those that are into these kind of simulation games. + The backstories behind the game's levels can be pretty amusing, and they keep the game moving. + Workshop jobs may not be the most rewarding in-game, but they offer a neat change in gameplay. + Seasonal theming is a nice touch that adds depth to the overall experience. + While there is a correct way to complete each job, you can do pretty much anything you want. + The Endless Mode essentially makes the game infinitely replayable. +/- The game is only listed as "Electrician" on the Nintendo Switch's menu, and that feels rather lazy. Cons: - Surprisingly not as deep as one would expect from a game of this type. - Control and gameplay issues can make certain tasks clunkier than they need to be. - There aren't a lot of tasks to complete in game, meaning that you'll be doing the same 4-5 tasks over and over. - Music sounds extremely random at times and often doesn't fit the game at all. - While the stories attached to each job can be amusing, the core gameplay loop can become very repetitive. A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.  You mean I'm not an actual electrician now? |
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