What do you expect from a sequel? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since the first trailer for the follow-up to 2022’s glorious PowerWash Simulator, which showed off a lot more of what has come before, but with slightly prettier graphics. Now that I’ve spent a good six hours playing the released version of PowerWash Simulator 2, and having a thoroughly good time doing so, I’m still pondering the same question. Because while I’m delighted to have a whole load of new dirty buildings and vehicles to spray, I really don’t feel like I’m playing a whole new game.
To describe 2022’s original is to describe 2025’s PowerWash Simulator 2. It’s a game about jet-washing enormous structures that are covered in dirt and mud, with a growing variety of jets, nozzles and sprays. Your job is to remove every last speck of dirt, at which point you get paid, can buy more gear, and then move on to the next project. It should be the dumbest thing, and yet it proves outstandingly soothing, even cathartic, as you methodically make a gross thing get shiny and clean. And while I’m delighted to report PW2 improves on the original in a bunch of different ways, what this amounts to is tweaks, streamlining the more fussy and less enjoyable aspects, and fixing the weirdness of how the first game handled soap. All very welcome, but none of it revolutionary. This is a refinement, not a step forward, and that leaves me in the peculiar position of being very happy playing the game, while still fundamentally disappointed to not have something new.
Given that I don’t have any big new concepts to introduce, let’s get right on to talking about those improvements. First up, while the menus are still ludicrously convoluted, the very worst aspect of the first game’s store is gone: soap. In PowerWash Simulator, you needed to buy refills for all manner of different types of detergent for different dirty surfaces—costly refills that lasted literally seconds, and I still suspect made little to no difference at all. You could sort of convince yourself it made a brick wall clean a bit faster, but it could just as easily have been a placebo effect. Now that’s all gone, and soap is just a thing you always have. In fact, it’s a single button press to swap between your washer and your soap-sprayer, with suds collecting on dirty surfaces in a very satisfying way. It’s something that the first game should have done.
Oh, and it now makes a difference. You’ll occasionally find bits of stubborn dirt, especially on glass, that won’t just spray off with water. So click, soap, click, spray, and now it’ll go. It adds a tiny extra element, and its unfussy and rewarding to do. It’s something the first game should have done.
Next up is a more rational use of your home base. In the first game you’d occasionally wash people’s vehicles in your own garage, and the game made play of the fact that you owned this business and building, but in the end it was only scenery. While it honestly doesn’t add anything significant, your business’s offices are really nicely used in PW2. They’re explorable, and you can spend your money on furniture and trinkets to decorate the space—completely pointless, but with the lovely bonus of everything you buy being utterly filthy (where are you shopping?!), and needing you to powerwash them clean first. Upstairs are your offices, including shelves covered in trinkets based on each completed job that let you return to play them again outside of story mode, and then a large map of the area from which you can choose story and bonus missions. Or you can eschew this entirely and just access the jobs from the menu as before. (But if you did, you’d miss out on playing with your three pet cats.) It’s something the first game should have done.
Beyond this…um. Come on, there has to be something else…Oh! You can move the ladders and frames around more easily, and while it still seems to be using the same broken tech that has them refuse to be put down in completely legitimate places but happy to be placed so they’re clipped through walls, it’s all better to use. Those huge frames with all the steps now have ladders on the outside so you can rapidly reach the top, and there are also mechanical cherry pickers for reaching far higher. It’s all stuff the first game should have done.
Of course, it’s also a prettier game. Not only is everything more detailed and better lit, but there are nice effects such as little animations of splattered dirt as you clean, and both water and soap effects that make them look as though they’re flowing. They’re not though, and that’s such a damned shame, because some actual physics was my number one wish for this sequel. It’s aesthetically pleasing, but you still have nothing like water trickling down surfaces, or mud puddling at the bottom to be washed away, or any of the seemingly obvious features to add to a sequel.
That was, in fact, one of two elements I suggested a PowerWash sequel would definitely have to add. The other, and it’s far more damning that this hasn’t improved, is the way the game either has a still very dirty surface suddenly PING! clean before you’re done washing it, or has you hunting down the single pixel of dirt on a railing before it’ll let you move on. My theory on this in the first game was that it must be based on the percentage of dirt remaining on any section—perhaps deciding a surface is clean if you’ve cleared maybe 98 percent of the dirt. So if you have a huge flat area of wall, that remaining two percent is incredibly visible and annoying when you’re not allowed to clear it, while on a tiny feature it’s a microscopic speck that’s infuriating to find. And, maddeningly, it’s exactly the same here. I don’t know how to make video games, but I still believe that changing the math from “percentage of total surface” to “percentage of total surface relative to size” cannot be an insurmountable problem.
I’m incredibly aware of just how ridiculous I sound, picking apart these elements in a lighthearted game about washing playgrounds, with a storyline about some gems being stolen from a giant merman statue whose magic beam had been preventing a volcano from erupting. Not least considering that I’m thoroughly enjoying the game! But then, I’m still mostly at a loss as to how this isn’t just a giant DLC pack for the first game with some necessary UI improvements. Or as we used to say in the olden days, an expansion pack.
So yes, please, if you were for some reason waiting for my blessing to spend your $25 on PowerWash Simulator 2 (or to download it from Game Pass I guess), then yes, go right ahead! Heck, $25 would be a great price for an expansion pack of this enormous size! This is very much PowerWash Simulator But Slightly Better, and that’s a good thing to have. It’s not a sequel though, really, is it? Is it? I don’t bloody know.
