You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?
There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.
I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.
Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.
There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.
The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.
That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.
