PowerWash Simulator Review (Switch Online Store)

In 1998 The Simpsons done disposable gag about how Bart refuses to do yard work for his mother and then demands that she let him queue up for a yard work simulator at a local fair. It’s funny, because who’s going to develop the virtual housework experience? Moreover, who would want to actually play it?

Anyway, PowerWash Simulator is a game where you use a pressure washer to clean various objects and places. You have a variety of attachments, cleaners, and attachments that you can use to streamline the process. It’s wonderful and, to be perfectly honest, absolutely has no right to be that much fun, whether you’re going solo or joining friends online for a squirting session together.

You’ll start small by cleaning your own branded van, and then immediately after that, you’ll be tasked with cleaning a garden that looks like it’s been untouched. decades. You’ll toss all that dirt into a big trash bin in the sky and use the money to buy bigger and better cleaning equipment for the firehouse, the playground, the Perseverance rover, and other typical stuff.

The same satisfying gameplay loop as on other systems remains completely unchanged here, and performance (though halved to a maximum of 30fps) remains pleasantly solid. As you get closer, the “resolution” of the dirt clearing process gets a bit pixelated, but that doesn’t spoil the fun in any way. Load times are a whole other story, ranging from 30 seconds to one time we waited over two minutes while moving from one partially filled location to another. Not ideal, but the job can take so long that you won’t see too many loading screens in your time.

There’s also a Tomb Raider-themed DLC available, which, oddly enough, isn’t included in the base game, but is free to download from the eShop at the time of writing, with no indication that it will be paid for in the future. You get a whole bunch of Tomb Raider goodies for remote cleanup with this pack, and while there’s nothing in the base game that the base game doesn’t actually offer in terms of cleanup, it has more cleanup content and it’s free. Can’t complain.

One thing that Very missing, however, gyroscopic aiming. I don’t think we can stress enough what a heaven-made gyroscope could be in a game like this, but it’s doubly disappointing with the rigidity of the standard dual analog setup. It’s not a deal breaker and you can still have a good time here, but oh how we were itching to wave our controller around and get it to actually do something in the game.