Table Flip Simulator Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

Table Flip Simulator embraces reckless behavior like it does familiar feelings of regret and depravity — with a baseball bat and a fickle grin that somehow justifies immoral decisions. I suppose, to some extent, it leans into a fantasy that most of us have had at some point or another. Take an office job, for example. The sun is out, and you’re disgustingly busy with more tasks that you can dare to handle. The boss wants more, and for some reason, they want you to work on the weekend. Internally, you want to put a fist through a monitor. In reality, though, you accept the challenge, and you bite your tongue long enough to survive another day. But not in Table Flip Simulator. No, this game tends to matters in a slightly less sophisticated way.

Above all else, Table Flip Simulator is a socket for you to insert your pent-up rage. It isn’t about pleasing the hierarchy, nor is it about making good impressions that might just propel your career to the next phase. No, it’s about giving in to your inner demons. That well-overdue promotion? Gone. That little voice inside your head that wants you to act on instinct? Alive and kicking. The only thing left for you to do is carelessly build on your wildest fantasies to ensure that there’ll be no job left to return to on Monday.

The office is but one case. Oh, there’s more to Table Flip Simulator than water cooler talk and conference calls, unnecessary defragmentation of local computers and brutal harassment. Alas, there are numerous ways for you to embrace your violent tendencies here. In a coffee shop, for example, you can fill the boots of a barista, as well as a high school teacher. Either way, the goal remains the same: wreak havoc on the workplace, and have a friggin’ good time whilst doing it.

As a physics-based sandbox at heart, Table Flip is all about pushing the boundaries of the design and seeing how much you can obliterate in the space you’re given to mess around with. As you destroy items and act on impulse, you earn new costumes, levels, and even the opportunity to craft your own sandboxes out of a wide range of set pieces and creative building blocks. And if you’re wondering whether or not there’s a point to any of this — no, there isn’t. But, if Goat Simulator could somehow manage to pull it out of the bag, then so can Table Flip Simulator, right?

While there isn’t much of a point to any of this, I will allocate praise where it’s due and say that, for a game that is both visually appealing and oddly therapeutic, it is a good way to blow off steam for an hour or two. What’s more, as it offers a built-in level creator that you can use to build and trial your own sandboxes, there is a good amount of depth to the experience. It’s utterly ridiculous, true, but it’s also a lot cheaper than your local rage room — and that counts for something, surely.

As far as the gameplay goes, what you see here is what you get: a ruthless, almost nonsensical sandbox experience that makes a habit of loosening the reins so that you can unleash total mayhem in all kinds of destructive and laughably creative ways. With that, you have objects to break, environments to destroy, and an entire host of characters to wrangle and knock out with all sorts of different weapons. And when I say weapons, I mean whatever you find on the floor. But other than that, what you’re essentially doing here is obtaining points in any manner you deem acceptable.

At its core, Table Flip Simulator is a bit like the illegitimate brainchild of Goat Simulator and Job Simulator. On the one hand, you have an ordinary job to do—a task that either requires you to serve coffee, teach impatient students, or complete administrative procedures. But on the other hand, you have a chaos simulator that, in all honesty, doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no major milestones to capitalize on, and there are no drawbacks for poor performance. Rather, you have a playground, a destructive physics-based environment, and a plethora of creative ways to transform an ordinary setting into a battlefield. The more damage you do, the more points you earn. And with that, you earn more opportunities to splurge your in-game currency on various cosmetics and levels.

Table Flip Simulator, like most chaos-fueled sandbox flicks of its kind, isn’t a game that you waltz into with the intent to stick around in for hours. While it quells that urge to smash bits and pieces into smithereens, it never really delivers much more than that. Don’t get me wrong, it is a lot of fun. But, like Goat Simulator or Just Die Already, it does come with a gimmick that, once you’ve successfully extracted its contents and charm, eventually becomes a little less appealing the more you subject yourself to it.

With all of the above said, I’d still consider Table Flip Simulator a good option for blowing off a little steam and keeping yourself entertained for an hour or two. Sure, it’s a little silly — but that’s sort of the point. If you can take it all at face value, then you shouldn’t be disappointed with it, basically.

Verdict

Table Flip Simulator gives a slap to professionalism on behalf of employees who’ve frequently entertained the fantasy of, well, flipping a table and abandoning their posts to walk off into the horizon. With a good selection of destructible environments and a satisfying physics-based gameplay style that waxes the best of sandbox-fueled chaos and simple action-oriented facets, it clearly makes for a stupidly good time. Again, it might not deliver much more than the absolute basics of a Goat Simulator-like sandbox experience. That being said, it gives you an opportunity to smash the living daylights out of your workplace — and I guess that counts for something, right? Right?