PowerWash Simulator 2 review: A clean cut sequel

I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when they find out about PowerWash Simulator for the first time. The standard response is to give a confused laugh, tut, and shake your head about how such a thing could be such a popular video game. But, there’s another kind of person, someone who, despite initially laughing at their discovery, will stop and think for a moment before realizing “actually…that does sound kind of fun”, and I’ve realized I only want to be friends with that second person.

If you can’t see the simple pleasure that can come from slowly making a very dirty thing into a very clean thing, then I feel sorry for you, as it might be one of the most consistent highs in life. It’s a mindset that helps me get pleasure from the simple things, and is also thoroughly diagnosable.

My neurodivergence aside, I’ve always loved these “real job” simulator games – be it House Flipper or Euro Truck Simulator. There’s a simple pleasure in being able to do a big job that would be ruinously expensive to take up without having to leave my home. Admittedly, power washing is not quite in the same category as trans-European truck driver, but even if you do own a power washer, probably the most exciting thing you actually have to use it on is your driveway, and that’s where the video game vastly improves on the experience.

You start off with a simple van and a public toilet, but before you know it, you’ll be blasting pressured water all over multi-story mansions, giant highway billboards, and giant teapot-shaped buildings. In fact, the creativity in level design is one of the biggest step-ups this sequel makes from its predecessor. It brings in a bunch of more complex structures like the aforementioned teapot and even stuff designed to troll the player, like the water-shooting gallery at the carnival, where shooting a lot of the objects with your spray will trigger all of its moving parts.

This is helped by a big expansion of what tools you have at your disposal. Where before it was just a few ladders to help you out, now you can get your hands on big scaffolding structures, scissor lifts, and even hanging harnesses to make getting to every nook and cranny on the game’s big and complex structures easier than ever, and it removes a lot of the frustration from the first game of certain corners and sections being annoyingly hard to reach.

On that note, there are more quality-of-life improvements that cut down on the first game’s frustrations. The biggest is the new checklist system for every individual object in each level, so you know exactly what you still have left to clean. You can check the list at any time, but on top of that, when you get down to the last few objects, the game places a marker on them so you can clearly see what still has a few specs of dirt left on it, so you’re not left scouring the entire level to find it – plus you still have the button that highlights dirt on objects from the first game.

This is all especially useful in the new multi-stage jobs, where you’ll start cleaning one object/room only for another one to be revealed to you upon completion, making jobs bigger than ever before. However, with bigger structures comes better tools to clean them too, as you can now unlock the surface cleaner to cover large flat areas in a quicker fashion. While this is a game about slowly completing a tedious but satisfying job, it’s always nice to be able to do it in the most efficient way possible.

Another thing I appreciate is that each little job in the career mode comes with a small story attached. Your client will give you some context about what you’re cleaning and why at the start of a job, but then, as you go along, the bottom-left corner of your screen occasionally pops up with group chats and texts from clients and the people close to them, telling you a little story. You might get to see a few people talking about your job in the community group chat, or watch two carnival stall holders slowly iron out their animosity as you slowly get on with your work. It’s not going to win the game any writing awards, but it’s a nice little touch to give this world of strange and filthy objects a bit more life.

The result is about the most straightforward but successful sequel you could ask for. It takes the core gameplay of the first game, makes a few additions without changing anything of what people liked, and then just goes about making everything bigger and better. If you liked the first game, this is exactly the sequel you wanted, giving you more of the same while making the experience smoother in the process. You could argue that there was more of an opportunity to innovate, but I’d argue that if fresh ideas are what you’re after, PowerWash Simulator 2 isn’t the place you should be looking – unless you count the fresh smell of soapy water, of course.

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