PowerWash Simulator (Xbox Series X)

It’s impressive how some high pressure water can make an object covered in decades of grime look brand new, and that satisfying and almost instantaneous switch from remarkably dirty to unbelievably clean certainly captivates many based on the millions of views pressure washing videos have received on Youtube. FuturLab might have figured out something even more satisfying though, giving the player the high pressure washer in PowerWash Simulator to do that very type of cleaning.

 

PowerWash Simulator’s main goal is really as simple as completely cleaning whatever dirty object or building you’ve been called up to wash down, but one of the first areas where PowerWash Simulator manages to do more than a simple simulator game though is in its creative approach to these jobs. The game’s career mode is packed with many different jobs that all come to mind when you imagine the kind of items or places you’d want to power wash, there being a good selection of mud covered vehicles, boats of different types, entire household exteriors, and public places like an abandoned subway station or public restroom. While there are certainly plenty of mundane ideas on offer, the game’s designers certainly get creative with the places you’ll end up or how they can manifest. The playground has plenty of elaborate equipment like a stegosaurus shaped slide, a person’s backyard has things like a shed and artificial pond to clean on top of equipment like a swing and barbecue grill, and you can even find some scenarios like cleaning a carousel or ferris wheel where you can leave it active while working or even ride on it if you like. You’ll need to even get ladders and scaffolding involved as the game expands its scope further and further away from simple garage work. Some truly imaginative concepts come into play the later you get in the Career Mode, but the game immediately lets you taste some of its willingness to expand beyond basic ideas with some special levels found on the main menu like the Mars Rover wash down.

 

For the most part a power washing job will have the object or area of interest entirely coated in a brown muck that is usually fairly easy to tell apart from any designs hidden beneath the grime. This layer of dirt is a bit unrealistically thorough but not in a bad way, the player getting the satisfaction of poking into every nook and cranny to take an absolutely dirty subject and make them shine with their power washing persistence. Some areas can be a bit creative with how the muck manifests as well, some clearly having more texture to the mess like the mud-covered body of a car while others you might have to wash away the graffiti of pranksters that hides beneath the first layer of grime. Every job, whether it’s a normal bicycle or an entire fire station exterior, will have pieces of the location labelled separately with a meter appearing when you focus your crosshairs on them to indicate how dirty the individual parts are. Once you get to certain fairly low percentage on that object’s dirty meter, it will automatically complete, this manifesting a bit different depending on what the particular object is. If you’re cleaning an entire roof top you might have the game complete the last fairly visible mud patch itself, this more a means of avoiding have to go over the roof again if instead of one large spot it had actually been many minor dirt patches you missed. However on small objects the game will expect you to be remarkably thorough to finally have the game recognize it’s complete with a pleasant ding. This does mean you will have times where you’re getting down on the ground in this first-person game and trying to find that last little speck, but since it is a size-based issue you usually won’t be searching too large an area for that last bit unless you knowingly did a spotty job.

Completing a power washing job in PowerWash Simulator does require you to clean every inch of the dirty object, but there are quite a few ways to make this a more feasible task. The first and certainly most helpful is Dirt Vision, the player able to press a button and see all remaining dirt nearby briefly glow yellow. This already is a great way to help find those pesky spots you missed, but it can even alert you to parts you might not have noticed since the areas you clean can become quite expansive in the later jobs. The pause menu also includes a very helpful tool, the many different objects all presented in a list that indicate how close they are to completion. If you just can’t find an object, you can select that item from the pause menu and so long as your pressure washer is off, it will slowly pulse with a white light to help you find where it is. While Dirt Vision and the pause menu aren’t always going to provide perfect assistance, they also avoid being too helpful where they would make a job that is conceptually simple practically automatic. You will have to put in the legwork and elbow grease to get every dot of dirt but the game doesn’t want that to be an excruciating task.

 

Some levels are perhaps overly large in PowerWash Simulator, especially near the end, but there are again a few pressure valves in place that can ease the scope of that demand so they aren’t too daunting. During the Career mode you will often get a few jobs at once or can even be offered new jobs in the middle of one. Some jobs like cleaning vehicles are often fairly short, meaning if you want something zippy yet still satisfying you can pop over and get it done in a fairly condensed time frame. Those long jobs have the benefit of not needing to be completed in one sitting as well. At any time you can pop out of a job and go do others, although the special bonus levels like the Mars Rover will wipe your progress for some reason if you attempt another. The main jobs are plentiful and benefit from the possibility of taking a break though, but even if you want to doggedly pursue every last speck in one sitting for the levels that can even take hours to complete, you can assuage some of that burden with cooperative play. Other humans can join a power washing session online, although depending on the mode the amount changes. Still, a level that is a big demand for one power washer can become a nice place to relax with friends that won’t go by too quickly. There is no in-game music though, but PowerWash Simulator also lends itself to being a game to play while you have your own on or possibly serving as a nice way of occupying time while listening to an audiobook or podcast.

 

The actual power washing work is pretty straightforward most of the time. Your handheld washer has a few nozzle types you can swap between with a button press, these having different strengths and ranges in terms of how they can wipe away the muck. A focused red nozzle’s stream covers barely any space but is guaranteed to remove almost all dirt it touches, but the yellow, green, and white nozzle cover more and more space at once at the price you might not clear away the grime as reliably. Yellow and green are still fairly potent so long as you’re not standing too far away though, those actually likely the workhorses of your nozzles as they balance spread and effectiveness rather well. Thankfully you don’t have to worry about damaging anything you clean, there being no risk of stripping paint or damaging vital equipment and you can focus on spraying the grime away. As you do jobs and get paid you can upgrade to better power washers and purchase new modifications like extensions and special nozzles, their utility appreciable but also not demanding too much of a player who wants to focus mostly on just whiling away time cleaning without a care. In fact that element perhaps is a detriment when it comes to the potential of the soap system, the player able to buy and use soap fluid to better clean certain surfaces.

For the most part, most every surface can be effectively cleaned with normal water, soap only really feeling necessary for blasting rust off metal surfaces or sometimes making glass easier to instantly clean. Soap does have the benefit of being a circular spray instead of the usual horizontal line of water so it can be a good idea to spritz something if you’re struggling to find a dirt spot, but mostly the soaps barely feel present, a benefit in a way so you aren’t futzing with too many tools but perhaps a missed opportunity if you’re looking for more involved and intricate work. One might also accuse the outfits you can buy as being pretty useless money sinks as well, but not only can you stand out from cooperative players, the game does break from first person and gives you a nice view of your job in fast motion once it’s complete. While the moment to moment cleaning can have some very satisfying comparison moments where you look from what you’ve done to what still needs doing, the sped up footage of your character washing the entire job really puts the work in perspective and gives you that sensation of a job well done. Even if you do choose to exit and return to a job later, this footage remembers all your work perfectly to make that replay always available even if you need those breaks from big jobs.

 

Another area where PowerWash Simulator didn’t need to put as much work as it did but it benefits from it anyway is in its story. The player works in the city of Muckingham as a power washer just starting out, the escalation of jobs matching your growing reputation in the city. At first this just means you get some jobs from occasionally eccentric customers, the job descriptions often a bit amusing and text messages after you reach certain cleanliness benchmarks providing something on the side to read while you continue to work. Soon though you’ll get recurring characters with little narratives and even begin learning of strange events around town like how the city’s cats seem to keep disappearing. This underlying plot actually never asks you to directly engage with it, your work always going to be cleaning things with your power washer, but it can justify some of the more unusual places you head to and it provides an interesting backbone to link some jobs together. It thankfully never gets dark and besides a pretty clever final job you’ll probably spend more time amused by the different workers competing to have the cleanest ride at the amusement park rather than worrying over high stakes situations.

 

Besides a creative and entertaining career mode (provided you are already bought into the power washing simulation aspect of course), there are a few extra modes to be had afterwards. There are only four bonus levels (although this will be expanded with DLC themed on the likes of Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII) but they are all good concepts and you can replay story mode jobs in Free Play where more players can join in or you can focus less on the money making side of things for a relaxing play session. A bit less solid in concept is the challenge mode which evokes Lawn Mowing Simulator in its pretty simplistic nature. Challenge mode has you attempt Career mode jobs with either a limited amount of water to clean the subject or a limited amount of time. You can earn different medals based on how well you do under these restraints so it’s not a binary pass or fail situation, but power washing quickly and efficiently clearly isn’t the game design’s intent even though the times and demands are built around that. None of the huge levels are included here to prevent it from being absurd, but it’s a pretty simplistic attempt at longevity and not a particularly captivating one. The main game already has tens of hours of different jobs before you’d need to think of dabbling in these extra modes though so it’s not too bad to just have them present for those curious if they could beat them.

THE VERDICT: PowerWash Simulator gives the player the power to turn even the messiest locations sparkling clean again without having to concern themselves too much with anything but the task at hand. This does mean things like the soap system are underutilized and some of the very long jobs feel like they push the inherent satisfaction of gradually blasting away all the grime, but there are also many simple yet helpful systems in place to prevent frustrating moments that could have brought the work down. The clear visual progress of this job is addictive and the game brings a surprising amount of creativity to what you’ll be washing down and how it can fit into a silly background story, PowerWash Simulator not just banking on a reproduction of an interesting real world job to keep your interest.

 

And so, I give PowerWash Simulator for Xbox Series X…

A GOOD rating. Sometimes after cleaning a huge area in PowerWash Simulator and seeing that sped up footage of all the dirt being blasted away can make PowerWash Simulator almost feel like a positively great game, but there are moments in the longer jobs where you can start to feel the immensity of that specific place’s dirt problem and its simple play isn’t really carrying those moments particularly well. However, that mostly emerges from the places with plenty of nooks and crannies or where the game has started whipping out enormous locations to serve as a gradual ramp up in what you’re expected to do, and it would certainly be a shame to be denied the opportunity to do some of the impressive and fun concepts that crop up later down the line. PowerWash Simulator isn’t afraid to provide some extra tools to prevent some of the potential problems emerging like not being able to find that last little bit that needs washing, but mostly a pretty clear laser focus on not overcomplicating the work does the game many favors even if the soap system ends up a bit tacked on because of it. PowerWash Simulator really captures that simple satisfaction of seeing how far you’ve come in comparison to how much is left to do in the current level, an idea that even dates back to the likes of Pac-Man. If the job concepts had stagnated or gone for simple rehashes perhaps it would have lost its energy sooner, but even when you’re thrown into more demanding work it’s something new and different that couldn’t even be mistaken for a rehash. The surprisingly detailed plot wraps up in a pretty nice bow too so despite a few levels that can drag near the end a good balance was mostly achieved, although even more special levels could have added more longevity than the basic challenge concepts.

 

In the same way a viewer can get sucked into a trance-like state watching the gradual work of a power washer on a Youtube video, PowerWash Simulator has the right ingredient to pull the player in and keep them entertained so long as the basic concept sounds appealing. Even its tedious moments are hard to fault for how much attention was given to realizing the places and objects you’re cleaning and varying them up, it perhaps more of a disappointment if you weren’t allowed to be as thorough as some jobs can be. It wouldn’t be right to just dismiss this as the expected form of a power washing simulator, the ideas the development team had to keep it interesting finding a good balance between not taking away from the simple thrill of the work while still providing some excellent concepts for what kind of things your straightforward but very gratifying power washing work can be pointed at.