I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys games like House Flipper or Castle Flipper, where you build and clean with no heavy time constraints. Despite the location the game s largely stress-free and it's satisfying to watch a city re-emerge from rubble.
THE GOOD
- A very generous free demo
-The graphics are great, outside the absolutely but unintentionally terrifying faces on most the NPC's (Seriously, turned around in game and had one RIGHT THERE staring at me with death in his eyes. Jumped out of my skin)
-All Hail the Shovel!
-Most of the projects are pretty straight forward and stuff that needs doing is highlighted.
-I get a big kick out of the fact you can collect the scaffolding while standing on it, and just drop safely to the ground. Awesome.
-The little vignettes and collectibles tell the story of the people who lived through the war (or sadly didn't) in a poignant and respectful fashion.
-Controls are pretty good for the most part once you figure out the trick of them.
-If you or a vehicle get stuck, there is an unstuck button.
THE "MEH"
-Some stuff is pretty weird, like the bulldozer leaping in the air and doing a barrel roll after hitting a small piece of rubble, and the wrecking ball behaving more like a kite in the breeze, but nothing game-breaking and the equipment doesn't destroy anything it's not supposed to. pretty funny to be honest.
-The decorating part can be annoying. Not everything is available at each location, which makes sense, but sometimes the choice of what's available seems weird. And stuff like teapots and bread and teacups can only be placed on a table alone. Huge table, but can only hold an itsy bitsy teacup. Why?

The Bad
-In some spots the movement gets really laggy, especially on staircases. It almost freezes on landings when you try to turn.
-My BIGGEST pet peeve is anything involving the boat. If you fall out of the boat you drown ( respawn without penalty on shore, so no biggie) but the damn boat is now inaccessible. If you leave the game and reload it might be back, but I just gave up on the pier in Hamburg because it wouldn't respawn. In one scenario you had to EXIT THE BOAT in the middle of the lake to fish, hardly intuitive, but nothing tells you that and I was lucky to have stumbled across it in the discussions. There has to be a way to fix this.

All in all, if you're okay with ignoring some tasks and like the type of game, you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of the game.

WW2 Rebuilder is a surprisingly powerful and rewarding "clean-up satisfaction loop" style game. Over a decent array of missions, you'll traverse post-war Europe to clean up and rebuild various locations ravaged by World War II. From train stations and shipyards, to public streets and warehouses, players can enjoy a diverse range of environments that have unique touches, a range of challenges and lots of hidden lore.

I want to start with the cons, just to get them out of the way. The biggest hurdle I've encountered is some of the physics with breaking apart objects. Smashing a table or pallet to collect the material components, can sometimes cause the components to fling apart wildly and scatter the pieces you need to pick up. Or torch-cutting metal pieces apart can trigger the same. It is frustrating and tedious, but not necessarily every time. Next up is the verticality. You can build ladders or scaffolding, but places where you need them may not give you great access to what you're attempting to reach, leading to multiple relocations and rarely, annoying platforming. There are also an array of quality-of-life improvements that I believe could benefit this game - such as picking up multiple objects at a time. Picking up each piece of wood or rubble is exhausting. There is a skill-tree, but some of the perks seem unhelpful - such as throwing your hammer? My last gripe is a little confusing and hard to explain, but the game feels...sticky. It's a difficult concept to articulate, but it can occasionally feel like you're working in molasses. The radial wheel to select tools isn't always responsive, the brush scrubbing frequently breaks away from its surface and stops, other functional mechanics like welding get hung up mid-job, tool switching occasionally happens randomly, and the placement of objects requiring you to break them to harvest can seem inconsistently placed within materials you can just pick up. Again, this is a very personal gripe and hard to adequately detail, but the flow just seems slow and frequently interrupted. These are all optimizations that can be fixed, so there's no reason to let these keep you from playing.

Now onto the pros! This game surprised me in the most delightful way. I was expecting a simple clean-up game set in WWII, but instead I got a full experience. There are these "ghosts" which when you approach trigger memories, collectibles to provide lore, and in some areas NPCs to interact with for secret missions or world-building. There is progression, narration, emotion, sympathy and power behind it. It isn't by any means the best story ever told, but considering what I was expecting this is just delightful. There are also lots of fun different tasks within each area, from defusing bombs and bulldozing buildings, to fixing planes and craning vehicles out of ruined places. Each area feels different enough, and has unique tasks to lend deeper identity to each mission. There is a tremendous variety of tools to use, each tailored to a unique function. You won't use every tool in every mission, and each mission feels long enough to be substantive but not too long as to be exhaustive. There's also a crafting and decorating mechanic, which allow you to customize the area somewhat and bring your final score up to full 5-stars. There's an abundance of materials for your crafting, and an additional "currency" for buying them if for some reason you don't have enough mats? It's not the most intuitive or robust system, but it's functional.

Ultimately, this a pretty good game and deeper than it looks. While there are a few issues and ideas that aren't fully fleshed out, this serves as a notably engaging, fun and charming addition to the genre. I highly recommend picking it up, even if it's just to dangle a Messerschmidt from a crane.

Great game with history thrown in, hope we can have more like this