PowerWash Simulator 2 is, just like the original, a pretty chill time. Presented with utterly implausibly dirty things to clean, you just methodically spray unending streams of water at them, scrubbing out that dirt one section at a time. It’s a borderline therapeutic experience, but how can a sequel be much more than just having more dirty things for you to spritz? Well, by giving you a few more ways to clean them for starters.
The core of PowerWash Simulator 2 remains pretty much identical, as each mission gives you something to clean that is literally caked in dirt from top to bottom, inside to out. It doesn’t matter if it’s a car, a piano or a whole building, it’s absolutely filthy to a comical degree. You’d think that a removals van would just be caked around the outside with the general grime from driving around – the kind that some kid would write a cheeky message in – and maybe a bit of dust and detritus from moving boxes inside, but no, it’s like a horror movie inside there as well.
Cleaning is a simple task or just pointing and squirting, choosing from a couple of different pressure washers, the spray width (which affects the range at which it can clean), and a handful of new options. You need to clean everything from every angle, so you’ll be getting right down to the ground to get under metallic trim and into wheel arches, angling into the grooves around the rear door, and climbing up to the roof to clear that as well! Each job is broken up into mini-goals that reward you with the ring of a bell for each sub-section you clean. A wing mirror here, a door handle there, and you’ve got that satisfying chime as you tick them off the list.
But that list can grow and evolve now through multi-stage levels, revealing messy horrors one section at a time. A rather futuristic public lavatory hides its filthy shame underground, asking you first to clean the top before it smoothly slides up and presents the full exterior, and once you’ve cleaned all of that up comes the abject horror of needing to clean the interior. It’s nice to have something dished out piecemeal like this, helping things feel more manageable, and also meaning that I didn’t need to break out any ladders to get up and clean the roof.
The art deco house, though, is a completely different kettle of fish. Here’s just this one monolithic task to clean, and we barely scratched the surface as time with our hands on session ticked away. I can absolutely see why having multi-stage levels helps in a game that’s all about being chill and relaxing, just breaking up some of the mental load of having a big hour-long clean up job.
There’s a bunch of new tools and reworked ideas within PowerWash Simulator 2. There’s a new surface cleaner, which is a bit like a water jet-powered mop on an extendable arm – it’s nice, but as you need to get pretty close up for it to reach out and work, I’ve not really felt the need to use it over a wider angled spread, though it’s no doubt going to please a bunch of carpet cleaning enthusiasts.
Soap is now fantastic, though. Instead of being a strange modifier spray that washed away particular types of dirt, it’s now a grime-busting lather that combines all the strengths of Mr. Muscle, Jif – I still refuse to call it Cif – and Cillit Bang into one. Basically, you spray the soap over everything and then, where you might have had to switch nozzle strengths to scrub away stubborn dirt, any strength spray will wash it all away. It might actually be a bit more work as you do actually have to go over everything twice, but it doesn’t really feel like it. Just note that you can only cover so much with soap before you need to reload… which here will actually remove all the soap that you’ve put down.
Some tasks will need you to get up and down the sides of buildings, and there’s some great new tools to let you do just that. A platform scissor lift is a handy accompaniment to more traditional scaffolding and ladders, but the star of the show is a window cleaner’s dream abseil, a simple dangling seat that you can move up, down, left and right to clean the side of high up places. This was put to great use when cleaning a huge billboard advert. Too high up for scaffolding to reasonably reach, and with a platform that only lets you get back so far, the abseil seat is the only real option for getting access to these large spaces. It works great, though there is a momentary fumble as you get on and off and have to adjust to the shifting axis of movements.
There’s plenty more to PowerWash Simulator 2 that we didn’t really get to toy with, from the customisable home base, to designing van liveries, to playing co-op online or in split-screen, and the career story, though we did at least get to give Ulysses the cat and some random kittens a little tickle every now and then. What’s most important, though, is that this retains that soothing essence of the reverse colouring book gameplay, with a few new options and tools just adding a smidgeon more variety.
