Review: Electrician Simulator
Many years ago I was responsible for shutting down the Leicester Square NatWest bank in London for a full afternoon due to me drilling through a live wire in their wall.
All I remember is a loud bang and then I came too about 8 feet away from the wall, holding a drill with a melted smoking drill bit and the whole place being dark, with muted voices of the staff saying “our computers have gone off”.
In my defence, NatWest accepted responsibility due to faulty installation.
And that dear readers is why I’m always a little hesitant dealing with anything electrical.
Thankfully, Electrician Simulator allowed me to fumble my way through the initial jobs without having to worry about shocking myself…though that does happen within the game.
Electrician Simulator is a first person experience where you take over the family business from your dad. The game eases you into its mechanics via your trusty laptop where VR missions gradually introduce you to the expanding variety of jobs/skills/tools that you will need to get familiar with, while jobs come in via 2 main ways. One being quick repair jobs that appear on your workbench, and the other being more in-depth work where you jump into your truck and visit peoples houses to help fix whatever electrical problems they have.
Your central hub is where you find your laptop, which is based in your garage and adjacent to this is your workbench room and your living area. These areas can be decorated through items you can buy in the shop area accessed through your laptop…my garage is currently decked out in a Halloween theme.
The tools you use are incrementally introduced to you as more intricate jobs appear, and as well as having to keep an eye on your earnings to buy new tools, they also wear out and need to be bought again when they eventually break.
The repair jobs on your workbench can become a little tedious after a while, but even after having to unscrew my thousandth screw, I still found the process of it quite a zen experience.
The missions away from your home take a little more thought, making sure that you tick all the mission boxes before you can leave. These missions are also sprinkled with some great moments of humour…one particular job had an email from someone who wanted all their lightbulbs removed and the switches disconnected as they were very sensitive to light. It was only after removing the lightbulbs and starting on the switches that I began to notice the odd coffin in various parts of the house. Yes, I was doing a job for a vampire!
The missions are not ‘one and done’ either, as follow-up emails appear giving you an update on your previous work and sometimes taking you back there to do more work. This all adds a little more immersion to the world and keeps your interest in the jobs coming in.
The controls can sometimes be a little fiddly, but I soon got used to them and they became intuitive, allowing me to repair certain things a lot faster than when I first began.
Graphically it isn’t going to win any awards, but little touches like being able to change your home environment help to stop it all from looking a little too stale.
I enjoy the simulator genre and Electrician Simulator ticks all the boxes for what I enjoy about the genre. It makes you think (I’ll admit to having to consult YouTube videos a couple of times when I got stuck) but it is also relaxing to play too…with no audio narrative or big sound effects, it’s a great game to play while listening to music or a podcast (60MW for example…nudge nudge, wink wink).
Recommended to simulator games fans and well worth a try if you want to dip your gaming toes into the genre.
System: Nintendo Switch, PC, PS & Xbox).
Review by Dave from an Xbox review code.
