PowerWash Simulator 2 review – mostly more of the same filth but that’s okay

PowerWash Simulator 2 opts for welcome refinements over big advancements, but it’s as weirdly compelling and winningly daft as ever.

Is there a sound more beautiful than the ding of a squirt well-squirted and a job well done? A baby’s laugh, you might counter, or the chittering chorus of a brand-new day. But as someone who’s put a good 92.7 hours into the original PowerWash Simulator, I feel confident saying that ding, and the Pavlovian pleasure it instills, is indeed the most glorious sound of all. And with the advent of PowerWash Simulator 2, it’s time to do it – and ding it – once more.

PowerWash Simulator 2 review

Developer: FuturLab
Publisher: FuturLab
Platform: Played on PC
Availability: Out 23rd October on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC (Steam, Epic); Switch 2 this autumn.

Some months have passed between the events of the original PowerWash Simulator and its sequel, which is important for two reasons. Firstly, it gives developer FuturLab an excuse to reset the balance after dishing out pressure-washing paraphernalia of such supernatural excess at the end of the first game, it would have made the sequel completely trivial if it had returned (officially, you’ve sold all your equipment to set-up shop in a flashy new HQ this time around). And secondly, it means a narrative gap to fill with more of that brilliant lore.

If you’re new to the series, the idea of lore in a game about ceaseless hosing might sound absurd, but – as anyone who’s found themselves inescapably swept up in the first game’s preposterous tapestry of petty grudges, corrupt politicians, missing cats, time-travelling aliens, long-lost civilisations, and erupting volcanoes will tell you – it’s one of PowerWash Simulator’s biggest draws. Let’s wind back a bit, though.

At its simplest, PowerWash Simulator is a game about pointing your nozzle at something grubby and then furiously blasting it – bit by bit, or if my friends are any indication, crudely drawn dick by dick – to a spotless sheen with a high-pressure torrent of water. If it helps, you can almost think of it as anti-painting, but there’s more to pressure washing than mere first-person point-and-squirting. You’ll spend just as much of your time scrambling around each stage’s filthy environment – clambering up ladders, dashing up scaffolding, or simply relying on a good old-fashioned leap – to reach troublesome pockets of dirt secreted in awkward nooks or on ledges several storeys high. And as your pressure washing odyssey continues, you’ll confront ever-more challenging grime. Stages – which range from pop-up public toilets to art deco mansions – grow larger and more intricate as time goes on; stains get more stubborn, and key to your continuing success is your slowly expanding arsenal of equipment.

In PowerWash Simulator, equipment is everything, with nozzles at the very heart of it all. Essentially, the wider a nozzle’s radius, the weaker its blast, so – faced with that trade-off – you’re always looking for the nozzle that’ll give you the best spread in any given situation, while still cutting through the layers of varyingly stubborn grime. Later levels can be dauntingly vast, sometimes taking upward of an hour to clean, but by keeping in step with your upgrades – spending the money you earn from jobs on attachments to extend your reach, or more powerful trigger guns – you can maximise your filth dissipation.

Not that there’s a whole lot of skill involved. All that moment-by-moment assessment and adjustment quickly becomes second nature, at which point you’ll either flee in horror at the unspeakable mundanity of it all, or you’ll become hopelessly lost to the primal pleasures of restoring each stage to its spotless, retina-searing glory, one dopamine hit of a ding at a time. Dings sound every time an item is checked off a level’s cleaning list, breaking each seemingly Sisyphean task down into more manageable chunks. A ding means progress; another tiny victory on the path toward a greater goal, and soon enough, the curiously hypnotic rhythm – that ceaseless ASMR hiss of water, the relentless Pavlovian ring – is vanishing whole hours of your time in pursuit of just one more ding.

Of course, none of this is news if you’ve spent any time at all with the original PowerWash Simulator, and it’s fair to say its sequel evolves the formula in only the gentlest of increments. PowerWash Simulator 2 is very much a game of modest refinement and expansion, with its most obvious addition being the new hub-like HQ area you can mooch around in and decorate with unlockable furniture (after a thorough deep clean, of course) between jobs. Sure, it’s essentially just a fancier menu interface, but there’s definite appeal in seeing your achievements presented in a more tangible form. Keepsakes from your adventures appear on your office shelves; newspaper clippings flesh out the increasingly preposterous narrative on your corkboard, and the mega-sized map of Caldera Country, where you’ll pick up new jobs, adds another layer to the series’ delightful world-building, giving everything a greater sense of cohesion. So while it’s hardly an essential addition, it does help present a considerably more polished face compared to the first game’s slightly slapdash tangle of menus, and it’s a nice focal point for inter-job socialising in co-op, which now supports two-player split-screen or four players online.

As for the pressure washing core of it all, FuturLab’s sequel brings welcome – if not especially dramatic – tweaks and improvements across the board. There’s a more intuitive control scheme on controllers, for instance, as well as a new on-screen indicator showing you exactly where those sneaky few remaining unwashed items are hiding. Elsewhere, climbing equipment has been expanded to include a stepladder, scissor lift, and a sort of dangling seat you can steer, while soap – used to loosen up particularly difficult muck – has received an overhaul. The limited-use, material-specific soap of the original is now all-purpose and endless in supply, meaning it’s far easier to incorporate its sudsy goodness into your workflow (although you do need to manually hose it off now), which FuturLab’s level design exploits often. And as far as those stages go, there’s a lot of good stuff here.

For starters, PowerWash Simulator 2 scales back on the fiddly and fairly unpopular vehicle jobs of the first game, instead focusing on larger scale, more diverse environmental challenges. Just a couple of levels in, you’re pressure washing a giant billboard while dangling over a vast desert highway (PowerWash Simulator’s bizarre juxtaposition of classic Americana and very British whimsy remains in full effect here), and then it’s onto a fairground shooting gallery packed with amusing callbacks, roadside gas stations, comparatively modest bandstands, and more. FuturLab has its level design formula down to an art at this point; PowerWash Simulator 2’s offerings look great – they’re packed with enticing, slowly revealed sight gags and primary hued detail – and play well too, sensibly breaking everything into smaller chunks requiring a variety of approaches (high bits, flat bits, intricate bits, and so on) to offset monotonous repetition. And to further allay potential fatigue, new jobs unlock intermittently as you hit milestones within a level, meaning there’s usually a new challenge if you crave a change of scene. Or you can always head back to HQ to hose down a sofa if you’re in desperate need of a palette cleanser.

It mightn’t be a revelatory advancement for the series, then, but it’s good, solid fun, and further elevated by that boundless charm. There really wasn’t a need for the original PowerWash Simulator to go quite as hard as it did on lore, but its daffy tapestry of narrative absurdity undoubtedly helped raise it far above the asset flip tendencies of its job-sim peers. And PowerWash Simulator 2’s pure, unfiltered whimsy is an equal delight, full of callbacks and amusing silliness that permeates everything. You’ll help out a street cleaner after a messy mishap during the town’s annual huckleberry celebrations; you’ll fix the damage done by an enthusiastic hairdresser mistakenly hired in place of an engineer; you’ll become entangled in yet more fairground grudges. And it’s all conveyed through a chorus of text message chitter-chatter by a swell of local residents who seem to have discovered group chat and picture messaging since the first game. It makes for a wonderfully engaging bit of world-building – enhanced by elaborate background environments that lend proceedings a lovely sense of place – ultimately speaking of the care and attention FuturLab lavishes on its extremely odd series.

Like its predecessor, PowerWash Simulator 2 definitely isn’t for everyone, and it offers little that’s going to convince naysayers that ceaselessly wiggling their nozzle back and forth is a worthy use of their time. This isn’t a sequel that paints its ambition in big strokes, but rather in smaller, canny refinements – that, together I think, justifies its existence as a brand-new game. PowerWash Simulator 2 might be mostly more of the same, but when that same is so charmingly ludicrous, so blissfully engaging – whether you’re looking for a social hangout or an excuse to chill and empty your mind – that’s hardly a criticism. Me, I’m probably back in for another 92.7 hours, and I can only hope a whole new generation of PowerWashers will succumb to that siren’s call of a ding; their hours slipping imperceptibly into days as they jubilantly blast through the endless muck, one crudely drawn dick at a time.

A copy of PowerWash Simulator 2 was provided for this review by FuturLab.