A 3D coloring book with the least functional multiplayer I’ve ever experienced in a video game.

The basic gameplay loop of Powerwash Sim is more fun and relaxing than I thought it would be. It’s a pretty zen and satisfying experience to clean a bunch of dirt off stuff. This experience would be made even better by doing it with friends, yet I cannot think of a better multiplayer game that is so uninterested in being a multiplayer game.

I have never, in my life, played a video game with such poorly made or optimized multiplayer as the multiplayer in Powerwash Simulator. I was floored with how bad it is. Firstly, progress is only tracked for the host. So if you’re hoping to play through the campaign with a friend, you’ll have to accept that you won’t unlock anything or progress your own game. The game is built as a single player experience first.

Let’s say you do decide to do one of the bonus missions with a group of friends. Good luck getting the gang together. It took us 30 minutes just to get all 4 of us into one game thanks to frequent connection issues coupled with offensively long loading screens. Once you do get in the game together, prepare to deal with obscene lag and sync issues. Throughout the game, you and your friends’ games will slowly get more and more out-of-sync. In their game, they’d see us cleaning a spot that we cleaned 15-20 minutes prior. By the end of our mission, my friends were over 25 minutes behind my game. I got the “Mission Complete” screen and we sat there for 20 minutes waiting for their games to catch up before getting bored and quitting.

This feels maybe nitpicky, but it would be cool if the game actually had some physics to it other than the water and dirt physics. I was a bit disappointed to find that the entire environment is basically a rendered static space. Anything you might expect would move like flowers, grass, windmills, etc, doesn’t. It’s a 3D coloring book and nothing more.

To add insult to injury, they keep dropping new content for the game while ignoring the issues that have been plaguing the game since launch. There are Reddit posts that are 2 years old complaining about the same issues we’re experiencing now. Fix your broken-ass game before adding Spongebob Squarepants to it.

If you want a game to play alone while you listen to a podcast or zone out, I’m sure Powerwash Simulator will do just fine, but I was pretty disappointed with how poorly-made the game was overall. It would be such a cool multiplayer experience to hang and clean with friends. Sadly, the multiplayer is genuinely the worst-made multiplayer I’ve ever experienced in a video game both in functionality and in optimization.

+ Cleaning can feel satisfying I guess
+ Probably a good podcast game or something

- Environments are static and lack any physics. It’s basically a 3D coloring book
- The most poorly-made, poorly-optimized multiplayer of all time. Don’t even bother
- UI controls on console are quite bad
- Can get tedious
- Finding the last 1% to finish a level or trying to find the tiniest dirt spec on a small part sucks
- Devs keep dropping new content while ignoring the bugs plaguing the game