Junkyard Builder Review (PC)

As if to illustrate the saying, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, Junkyard Builder paints a scene—a grubby, dilapidated scene, I’ll admit, but one that also reinforces the notion that even the shoddiest of objects can be brought back to life. With the art of conservation fanning its flames, FreeMind S.A. asks the question, what would you do to preserve the environment and keep the remnants of former keepsakes in rotation? If you answer with something along the lines of, ‘why, build a junkyard and fill it with restoration projects, of course’ — then welcome to the club.

Think Trash Goblin, but without the precious metals and diamond-encrusted fantastical objects of a certain wizardly named archipelago, and you might have a rough idea of what Junkyard Builder is all about. It is, in layman’s terms, a virtual sandbox that you can mold and upgrade into a scrap pile of salvageable trinkets, cubed goodies, and other relatively profitable doodads and accessories. But, where Trash Goblin spends more of its time focusing on the restoration process, Junkyard Builder instead aims to pepper its assets over a multitude of different areas—business development, construction, foraging, and outsourcing, for example.

Junkyard Builder is, if anything, a bog-standard chore core game at heart, with the appropriate bells and whistles of a traditional title à la House Flipper firmly in its grasp. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, I’ll admit, as the audiovisual aspects are, well — they’re passable, to say the least. Yet, there are some components that grease these wheels that are surprisingly good—engaging, even. But, for the sake of establishing a clearer image, we should dial it back a notch and launch this review from the beginning. Care to join us? Then let’s get scrapping.

Waste Not, Want Not

On the one hand, you could argue that, if you have played one trade-centric simulation game, then you have more than likely played ‘em all. And I’ll be honest, you could say that Junkyard Builder doesn’t exactly do a great deal to dismantle that notion, either, for it does, respectfully, take the same textbook formula as a dime-a-dozen career-centric sim and rolls with most of the same features. The only major difference between this and, say, Recycling Center Simulator, is that it lets you create rarities from the materials you salvage. *Checks notes thoroughly* Oh, wait—

Like its kin, the game revolves around the inception of a booming trade—a junkyard, in this case—and the steps one would naturally take to elevate its husk of an allotment to a thriving, self-sustaining world that has the potential to produce copious amounts of wealth, experience, and valuable items of utmost significance. To that end, players can pillage, ransack, and crush their ways through the system, using all the tools in their arsenal to make nicknacks out of rusty alloys. Can’t complain there.

Junkyard Builder invites you to alter between a few different tasks, with some of them requiring you to travel around a barebones world to collect waste and other “useful” scrap materials, and others requiring you to recycle items in the corresponding bins before you can flip a profit, so to speak. There is a bit more to it than that, mind you; the game also invites you to rebuild old vehicles, polish old tools, and utilize a selection of heavy machinery such as cranes and trucks to transport, squash, and manipulate objects.

I Guess You Can Polish a Turd

At the center of this experience is an incredibly simple set of digestible instructions for you to follow: travel to homes, wooded trails, and other suburban places, and collect trash—bags, street signs, car parts, and other pieces of furniture or equipment—to bring back to your junkyard. As you gather these materials, the process begins to take shape, with options varying from restoration projects to ten-second scrap tasks finding their ways to your workstation. And that’s really all you have to do here: create items from old trash, and then sell them for a few bucks. The more you sell and develop your junkyard, the more you can unlock—better tools, classier skills, and even more mystery containers, the latter of these being in receipt of separate perks and rewards. A simple setup, for sure — and yet, weirdly, an ironclad one, at that.

I can’t bring myself to say that Junkyard Builder looks great — because it doesn’t. Well, it aligns with the usual suspects in the chore core spectrum, I’ll say that much. And by that, I mean that it has a lot of jagged edges, janky landscapes, and an all-round unpolished exterior that you could quite easily slate for being half-baked at best. And yet, even with a lack of polish and technical fine-tuning, I find that it still brings a little something special to the world that is, respectfully speaking, a trash compactor. Like its notable counterparts, perhaps, it brings a sense of satisfaction to the work that you carry out and the milestones that you surpass. It’s predictable, for sure, but with a good amount of rewards to unlock, there’s always something to keep you pushing forward here — even if it is more trash.

Verdict

While I can’t dispute the fact that Junkyard Builder has a surprisingly addictive progression hook for you to subject yourself to, I can’t quite bring myself to say that its remaining components, both visual and audio related, are as well refined as they should be. But this is commonplace in B-Class indies, it seems; in fact, I would’ve been more surprised if it had launched with a palate that was fundamentally superior. It’s an Early Access title, too, so even with its minute flaws and technical limitations, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in future updates.

I’d like to think that, if you have a keen interest in chore core work and repetitive mechanics, then you should be able to scrape just enough joy out of the mindless pursuit of a good construction sim. And don’t get me wrong, Junkyard Builder can be that, but it still has a couple of flat spots that could do with a little extra time in the oven. Here’s hoping, then, that with the necessary adjustments in place, FreeMind can propel its bundle of trash into a bin that’s a little more, shall we say, structurally sound.