The first level of PowerWash Simulator 2 is cleaning the moving van that just brought you to your fancy new office. ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore,’ say developers FuturLab, as you take in the map wall where you can select levels in an expanded PowerWash world, the open warehouse space where you can place items of furniture you buy and clean. The second level is cleaning a state-of-the-art public toilet.
This is very funny. FuturLab are aware that they can’t really move you that far; in terms of the metaphor we’re probably in Colorado. That’s okay. It and the game both have nice scenery. And despite me being glib, there are a host of small changes that add up to noticeable improvements. They’re just probably only noticeable if you were already Washmaxxed and had over a hundred hours in the first game.
If that’s you, then you already know the allure of the constant white noise from your powerwasher, the click-click-clack as you cycle through different nozzles, and the ting as you complete a section of a level. You are a modern Hercules cleansing a parade of Augean stables from their years of encrusted faeces, basking in the glow of an illusory job well done even as actual, real-life filth dries onto the unwashed soup bowl in your sink. If that’s not you, then welcome to an FPS where your gun blasts high-pressure water at an array of dirty buildings and vehicles.
PowerWash Simulator 2 does this, but more, in the grand tradition of sequels. The most noticeable additions are two new types of washer. You still have the trusty Prime Vista from the original game, but now there’s the Urban X, which has increased power but less area-of effect, and the Swirlforce Surf Ace, which has a big, flat head for cleaning big, flat areas. You can buy upgrades and add-ons with the dosh you earn from each level – think more powerful nozzles and different length extenders to increase reach – but you’ll probably use the new Urban X the most. As was even winked at in one of the PWS2 trailers, they basically all do the same thing.
There’s also a new stepladder, the scissor lift goes higher, and for larger structures you now get a harness and swing of the sort used by the more Tom Cruisian breed of window cleaner. These are really fun to zip up and down on, but in all equipment cases the changes I felt most were the little ones.
The multi-story scaffolding now has a ladder on the outside, so you can climb straight to the top rather than huff up all the flights of stairs! There’s a new nozzle that lets you manually select a desired spray width! Goodbye different types of soap for different surfaces, which had to be bought each time from the store; hello one all-purpose soap of which you get a limited supply for each level! The controls have been remapped so that you can switch between everything with a smooth, professional flair that would surely impress your clients if they were watching, or real. They’re all intelligent changes that feel like the devs observed how people played the first game, and I commend them.
By contrast, the brand new office and furniture I hardly felt at all, except as an occasional annoyance. I appreciate the idea, but the currency you buy cosmetics with (including not only the ranges of goth/retro/futuristic shelving, but also your clothes and van decals) caps out at 2k, and you will run out of things to spend it on long before you start to get annoyed by the ‘You’ve reached your PowerWash Point limit!’ messages that flash on screen. The collision boxes on the weird coffee tables and Dali-esque lamps are both huge and capricious, so you can’t, for example, put a table on a rug. Your warehouse ends up looking like a less fun IKEA, and I felt little motivation to go to my home base between levels.
That’s a shame because apart from the second-hand furniture jumble, your office has a cork board that collects newspaper clippings further clarifying events around each level (the moon is spinning, but probably don’t worry about it!). As well as the town map, there’s a shelf of miniatures representing completed jobs which… well, serves the same purpose as the map in that you can select levels to replay. But in a more visual way. Plus the miniatures are really cute.
Why, there’s the old man’s mobility scooter, that got muddied up when he was lost in the forest for several days. And the cactus-themed motel. And there, the moving planetarium! In general the levels are a good mix of smaller projects (the corrupt ex-mayor’s double-long leopard-print limo), and larger ones (the theatre covered in gunk), all of them tending a little towards the whimsical but some more than others (teapot house in the forest). There are a few in there that feel like you’ve been given big flat surfaces to keep you busy, with an air of ‘Clean it, wash-pig’, including a giant airship, and a barn with attendant grain silo. These aside, you’re in for a billboard time, most especially the level where you clean a literal billboard.
Here, too, are small improvements. There’s a little application of physics, so hanging signs will swing when you start to wash them, played to great effect in a funfair shooting gallery, where hitting targets causes the scenery to change. The fair levels in general are great, including a fun-house with many moving parts, one of my favourite levels. There are also new and more varied types of dirt. The hateful barn, for example, is crusted in places with old hay. A spa on the side of a mountain is covered with impacted snow that glitters very slightly when you walk, and ice with changing reflections. You may be delighted, sometimes, when you clean a window and find something was on the other side of it.
All this is without going too much into the story. I was surprised to find that the first PowerWash Simulator was a sci-fantasy game when, part way through, I cleaned off a flying saucer and a magic monolith of a merman (say that three times fast). There isn’t none time travel and world saving in the sequel – the many idiosyncratic characters who send you odd texts while you work all come together in the final few levels to uncover a conspiracy and save the world again, like an off-screen version of the Riders of Rohan – but there’s less.
More often you’ll be gently ribbed by levels that reference the first game. The aforementioned shooting gallery’s targets are effigies of the flying saucer, the monolith, and the briefly-erupting volcano from which you and they saved Muckingham. I very much enjoyed this, but I can imagine it has smaller returns if you didn’t play the first game. The same is true of all those small changes I liked. But at the same time, if you didn’t play PowerWash Simulator, you’ll just come to PowerWash Simulator 2 as the best damn version of a game where you slowly waterblast crud off a toilet you ever did see. Not much to complain about there.