The Tenants Review – Test of the Funny Landlord Simulation

The Tenants Test – Rough landlords, a lot of Furniture, Rats, and Much More in the New Economic Sim Strategy Game

In The Tenants, we play an interior designer, real estate agent and landlord, we furnish apartments, we take care of tenants’ worries and we kick them out when they don’t pay enough.

In this mix of tycoon game and The Sims-like social game with construction mode and hundreds of pieces of furniture, we furnish apartments, we take care of the tenants’ worries. Investment in new houses and apartments, cockroaches, alcoholics, or earthquakes are just a few of the problems we have to deal with.

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This article is available here as text, but also as a YouTube video (German voice-over, many subtitles). This way you can choose how you would like to enjoy it most.

The Tenants Review Video

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

The Tenants Review – Intro

Hi there, here is the Zap. In this The Tenants review, you’ll get a sneak peek at the new economic strategy indie game with extensive construction mode and lots of tycoon gameplay. I’ll tell you how it plays, what’s in it, and at the end, you’ll get a rating for The Tenants test from me. But most of all I want to give you all the info so you can decide for yourself if you might enjoy the game.

The Tenants is developed by Ancient Forge Studio and published by Frozen District. So far there is only one other game from this developer, the tactics RPG Glorious Companions. I received a free trial key, my thanks for that. However, this should not affect my review, as I always test all games with the thought in the back of my mind, how would I feel if I paid full price.

The Tenants Gameplay – Game Type

In The Tenants, we play a real estate agent, interior designer, interior decorator, and landlord. At first, we don’t own any apartments. But with the help of our uncle, who is a skilled handyman, we gradually work out the money we need to invest. We do this by taking jobs from other brokers to refurnish their tenants’ apartments.

Here there are usually rough guidelines on how the individual rooms should be furnished. What quality the furnishings should have approximately is determined by a limited budget. Our uncle does the cleanup and handyman work and repairs. After that, we take care of the design and furnishings.

Here, The Tenants offers a nice building mode, very reminiscent of The Sims. We can’t quite build our own buildings, but we can at least draw and tear down walls and put in new doors. We then have numerous wallpapers, tiles, floors, and a large number of furniture, lamps, carpets, and many everyday objects at our disposal in the interior decorator mode.

So we can adapt the apartments to the requirements of the orders and the editor really allows us to furnish quite fancy rooms and houses. For successful actions, we also get experience points and advance in levels. We get new furniture, wallpaper, etc. unlocked for each of these levels, so our choice is constantly expanding.

In addition, there are also other jobs. In some, we have to take care of other brokers’ apartments for a few days. Tenants can get all kinds of problems, from roach or rat infestations to broken heaters or burst water pipes, to faulty electrical appliances or cracks in the walls from earthquakes.

Most of the time, we then have to send our uncle out to act as an exterminator to take care of the animals or make repairs. For more complicated cases, we send a professional. Here we can’t take too much time, because if the problems are not solved quickly enough, the tenant will take care of an expert himself and that makes for much higher costs and a bad rating for our company.

So gradually we earn some capital that we can invest in our own apartments and houses. Here also loans from the bank can help, but of course, they bring high-interest rates. Thus we shimmy ourselves slowly upward into the higher landlord circles.

The game offers here three districts, which we unlock one after the other, but can use together afterward. In the current version, however, the third district is not yet unlocked. So we start in the slums, increase to the richer suburbs, and at the end, there is also the high-priced city center, which is so far locked.

The Tenants – Tech, Graphics, Sound, Engine, Voice-Over, Translation

The Tenants is built with the Unity engine and thus both stability and performance are not a problem. Overall, it only crashed once for me in well over 20 hours of testing. For an Early Access title that only launched about a month ago, this is already a good start.

There is also an extensive roadmap where hundreds of new pieces of furniture, new quests, new events, and also the third district are announced. The development is expected to continue until 2022 and the game will be expanded with some more possibilities. And in the short time since the Early Access launch, the team has already released 5 updates.

The graphics are low-poly style, but definitely not boring due to an enormous amount of different models. The various textures are also not in high resolutions. But overall, the game actually creates quite a pleasant overall look out of it. The game is not a visual masterpiece, but the graphics serve their purpose, are varied, and sometimes, when the light is favorable, even a bit pretty.

The animations of the characters are, of course, far in the foreground in this kind of game. And here the developers have done a very good job. Because the tenants of our apartments and houses can do an enormous number of different things and everything is animated handsomely. Sometimes I had to smile and smile when the residents do yoga, really hang in when they game on their cell phones, or start to shiver when the heating breaks down again.

The Tenants’ soundtrack is practical, but not amazing. Many things make appropriate sounds, the inhabitants make Sims-like sounds by which you can roughly pick out their moods and actions. In addition, there are short music tracks that do not annoy but also do not excite.

Voice-Over output is not available, but there are on-screen texts and item descriptions in a total of 18 different languages, and at least the English and German texts are quite usable.

The Tenants Gameplay Screenshots Ingame

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

The Tenants Test – Opinion and Conclusion

The Tenants is pretty unique in its own way. I don’t know of any games that offer a similar gameplay mix, and for that particular idea alone, the game already gets a sympathy bonus. It is fundamentally an economic simulation, but also offers some creative moments with the construction mode.

Through the many tenants and their idiosyncrasies, you also have a little bit of social simulation going on. And throughout the game, there’s this Sims-like goldfish jar effect, where you can find fun peering into people’s apartments and following their daily routines.

The economics section isn’t ultra-complex but does offer some finer points to pay attention to. Utilities, acquisition costs, broker fees, possible loans, and many other costs must be considered. And with the tenants, we not only have to keep renegotiating the rent but also make sure we keep the apartments interesting with a good selection of furnishings and decorative items.

The build mode is surprisingly extensive for a game from an indie team. Over time, we unlock a really wide range of furniture, utensils, lamps, wallpaper, flooring, and many other things via a level system. And if we use this ever-increasing selection properly, we can keep optimizing our rental income as well.

In addition, the pure landlord life is still loosened up by additional jobs. Here we do work for other brokers, such as looking after their tenants for a few days, looking for suitable new tenants for their vacant apartments, or renovating individual rooms and entire apartments as interior decorators.

Also, the minor and major disasters, from Internet upgrade requests and cockroach infestations to water pipe bursts and robberies to earthquakes and fires, constantly add some action and variety to the gameplay. These little extra tasks are often like a mini-game where we send our uncle off as a handyman or we have to respond quickly on the phone, no matter what other tasks are distracting us.

But not everything is perfect in the colorful tenant world. There are still all sorts of balancing problems. For example, larger apartments or entire houses with gardens and garages are often much harder to rent out. Because, for example, when looking for new tenants, there are house inspections that are limited in time, but because the distances in the apartments are much longer, it doesn’t really fit. And to get good tenants into such buildings, who also pay accordingly, is enormously difficult to impossible.

Also sometimes the Devil is in the Detail. For example, when evaluating apartments, mixing floors or wallpaper is an absolute no-go, as the game devalues this massively. Or tenants who have paid high rents for months and were also perfectly happy doing so, suddenly lower their rent by more than half, completely for no apparent reason.

Generally, the rating system is mainly about having as many expensive things as possible in the apartment, but not at all about whether it is sensibly arranged or not. There is often not enough fine-tuning in these logic calculations in particular.

And so one is annoyed several times if you think, you created a particularly terrific dwelling, whereby the tenants find it however totally stupid. And at the same time, the hovel next door, with the last dirty furniture throws a much better rent, nevertheless. Here the developers still have to invest a few hours of work, so that this area becomes more logical and frustrating moments are avoided.

Overall, The Tenants is not yet a fully finished game. The Early Access status is not without reason, and there is still work to be done. Besides bugs and balancing, I would just like to see more for continuous motivation. More side jobs, more furniture, more variations in the tenants, etc… But there is probably never enough available. However, the DEVs have already announced some improvements and enhancements there as well.

To sum everything up, though, you can say that if you’re a Tycoon Gamer or a fan of small optimization games and building games, you’re already getting a lot of gameplay fun here for €17 or $20. And if even half of the announced stuff still finds its way into the game, this fun-per-price ratio will soon get a lot better.

The Tenants Review – Score

All in all, The Tenants is a really good game for a small price. You can definitely find 10 to 20 hours of fun here, and if you really dig in there are certainly 50 hours or more in there. For this offering, I’d like to give The Tenants a basic rating of 83%.

For the problems in balancing, minor bugs, and still missing game content, such as the third district, however, I subtract a total of 10% from this again. This brings me to a current final rating for The Tenants in the early Early Access stage of 73%.

In its current state, it’s still just too much of a construction site in some corners for a top rating. But if the developers put more work into it in the coming months, I see the potential for up to 85% at the end.

Outro

Do you like managing fussy tenants and being a badass real estate agent? Or are early access games and grumpy renters not something you can enjoy? Feel free to write me your opinion in the comments or in the community Discord.

More gaming news, game reviews, and guides can be found on the YouTube channel or at https://zapzockt.de – thumbs click, subscribe, and share with friends certainly can’t hurt, and then I wish you a great day, ciao ciao, your Zap

Links and Sources

The Tenants Game Website

The Tenants Steampage

Game Twitter

Game Facebook

The Tennants Discord