When I was a child, I rushed to get my chores done so I could fire up my favorite video games. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would devote so much time to a game about doing chores. PowerWash Simulator 2 expands on the gameplay and map design of FuturLab’s surprising 2022 hit, creating an experience that is at once arduous, time-consuming, and repetitive. But as I watched the dirt and grime melt away from the various surfaces over tens of hours, I had a constant feeling of satisfaction.
Like its predecessor, PowerWash Simulator 2 places you in absurdly filthy environments and tasks you with using your high-powered hose to make the area look as good as new. The career mode spans 38 levels, each focused on jobs of varying scopes, with some featuring multiple stages. Over the course of more than 20 hours of gameplay, I cleaned scooters, bathrooms, playgrounds, gas stations, mansions, airships, and a lot more. Thanks to the improved visual fidelity, I relished the transformation of the environment, though I would have enjoyed more realistic water physics; when you spray dirt at the top of the wall, it doesn’t run down the surface, it just vanishes.
Though I played solo for the majority of my time with PowerWash Simulator 2, these missions are made more manageable through co-op with up to four players. Thankfully, this iteration adds shared progression, meaning players who go into another cleaner’s session receive credit for jobs they complete, allowing them to skip that job in their career mode save file. This goes a long way towards reducing repetitiveness as you progress through the career.
The gameplay is consistent as you work through the levels, but the jobs are varied and, at times, daunting. I sometimes didn’t realize what I was getting myself into when I said “just one more,” like when I took a job that required me to clean a target-rich carnival shooting gallery. The larger jobs took me upwards of an hour and a half when playing solo, which caused tedium to set in. That sense of tedium, when combined with how laser-focused you need to be, often led me to feel more exhausted than I have with other games when I emerged from a marathon session.
This entry adds a ton of new tools at your disposal, including an improved soap sprayer that loosens dirt, a wide area-of-effect surface cleaner, new lifts to help reach higher areas, and additional upgradeable washers and nozzles. I enjoyed choosing the correct nozzle for the range and dirt depth and methodically going from segment to segment until every piece of the larger puzzle was spotless. As you finish an area, it blinks with a dopamine-producing ding, and I appreciate that the threshold for what constitutes 100-percent clean has been tuned; you are much less likely to get stuck trying to find a tiny remaining speck of dirt to finish a job in the sequel. However, on the few occasions when I couldn’t find the final section to clean before wrapping up a job, I could easily pull up the checklist and set a waypoint.
PowerWash Simulator 2’s career mode features a narrative told through texts and environmental storytelling. While I was often amused by the exchanges that popped up in the corner of the screen, they were entirely inconsequential to my experience. I was mildly intrigued by the mysteries that unfolded throughout the loose narrative, but I was so focused on the job at hand that I typically would forget there was a story at all until the next beat hit. PowerWash Simulator 2 is a perfect game to play while you listen to music, an audiobook, or a podcast, as the sound effects amount to little more than white noise over the course of any given job.
PowerWash Simulator 2 is a very specific kind of game that will appeal to a very specific kind of audience. If you’re the kind of person who spends your evenings watching videos of things being cleaned or organized, you’ll likely enjoy an interactive version of that. However, if you prefer your action heavy or your systems robust, you might find yourself bored or restless. Though I fall more into that latter category, I felt an undeniable satisfaction each time I completed a job, which serves as a highlight to the overall package.
