As one of the crown jewels of the simulator genre, I’m not surprised that someone would shamelessly copy PowerWash Simulator. However, that game is so good that the idea of a simulator where you paint instead of power washing still sounds like it could be a very fun time. After playing the demo, I was sold. After playing the entire game I’m disappointed, underwhelmed, and kind of shocked by some of this game’s choices. There’s a lot to like in the first few hours, but this is basically PowerWash Simulator (PWS from here on) with a tiny fraction of the content, a ton of additional tedium, and one of the worst-controlling vehicles I’ve seen in any title.
The game starts off just fine, as Spray Paint Simulator has you begin just as PWS does – with a vehicle. You mask off certain sections of a car and then paint it bit by bit. The second level sees you painting kitchen cabinets. The third, and best, level has you paint an art gallery. During this, the game lives up to its premise. When you begin each level, you have to purchase tape and paper to mask off certain areas, plus you need to remove anything that’ll be in the way, such as doorknobs and the like. Then you buy the instructed paint colour and spray the intended area. It works well, spray painting everything is fun, and it’s satisfying when you finally remove all the masking and see the finished job.
You can equip different kinds of nozzles that have better range or coverage but use more paint or more battery power. Paint works much like it does in the House Flipper games – you purchase a pail of it and then interact with it to fill your spray tool. During the games first four levels, all of this is perfectly alright. Needing to refill paint regularly can be a bit annoying, but this is a simulator so that’s far from a deal breaker. The first four levels aren’t gargantuan, so it’s all a minor annoyance. Much like power washing, spray painting is very relaxing, so fans of PWS will definitely find that this game does scratch a similar itch.
There are differences beyond buying and refilling paint and spare batteries, though. While PWS dropped all of your ladders and the like in the levels, here you grab them from the menu after purchasing them a first time. There’s a whole suite here – a step ladder, multiple heights of regular ladders, multiple heights of scaffolding. It’s honestly very convenient. You can even purchase new kinds of shoes, including a pair that claims it’ll let you climb things, although I couldn’t figure out how to make it work (so I assume it just gives you better traction on slopes, which is incredibly misleading.) The best change is that you can press a button on your tablet to highlight all unfinished areas instead of just one at a time, which glow through walls and geometry.
After just a few levels of fun, Spray Paint Simulator takes you to a gigantic iron bridge. It wants you to repair bits of it (I thought I was a painter!) and paint the entire thing a single colour. Fans of PWS will remember the game’s famously painful subway station level, which took hours to clean. The iron bridge here is a hell of a lot more tedious than the subway station could ever hope to be. You get dropped into it and have to slowly and awkwardly attempt to paint this enormous bridge where it’s a pain to reach a significant amount of it.
Once you’ve painted almost 20% of this bridge, the game forcibly takes you to another level by saying that you lack something needed to actually finish the bridge. This is where you’re introduced to the Cherry Picker – a vehicle that lets you raise and lower yourself, perfect for reaching the parts of the bridge that wouldn’t be feasible without it. After you paint the Cherry Picker, it’s back to the bridge where you’ll need to use it. From here on out, I mostly hated playing Spray Paint Simulator.
For starters, the Cherry Picker is just a piece of trash. It’s confusing to control, awkward to position, and the worst part is that it has a tendency to tip over by coming into contact with geometry. I can’t tell you how many times I had to stop and wait for it to reorient itself after strangely tipping to the side and then rocking back into place. It’s nauseating and terrible, sure, but since you simply can’t see where the bottom part of the vehicle is when you’re higher up (the game is first person, after all,) you’ll have little control over what happens when you’re trying to paint something tall.
Using the Cherry Picker on the iron bridge level is an absolutely miserable slog of an experience. There are so many pieces to paint and it can be incredibly difficult to make the vehicle do what you need it to. Combined with how hard it is to reach certain areas that you need to paint, the whole thing is just dreadful. Coupling this with how frequently you need to refill your paint (or buy more of it) and having to swap out your battery (why did the devs think players would need to regularly swap out two things?? Just let us paint!) it doesn’t take long for this level to turn into one of the worst times I’ve had gaming in recent memory.
“But it’s just one level! How can you criticise the game this strongly for just this??” you may be asking. Well, that’s true, it’s just one level. But it took me four excruciating hours to paint it. The entire game takes maybe 11 or 12 hours to complete, meaning that this one bridge is at least a third of the entire game’s experience because there are really only seven levels (and two of them are small vehicles.) As far as I can tell, Spray Paint Simulator is not an Early Access title, so there’s a truly paltry amount of content on offer here. There’s one more level after the bridge. Surely that doesn’t add more frustrations onto the pile, right?
Well isn’t that cute? But it’s wrooooooong!!! The last level has you painting a giant robot, which is thankfully far less aggravating than the bridge was. Plus, painting a giant robot is just a fun concept for a game such as this. But don’t worry, decisions were made to ensure that the experience couldn’t be too fun. Each painting phase of the giant robot tends to have over 100 different sections to mask off. While I understand why we’re made to do it, painstakingly adding paper and tape to over 100 pieces requires more trouble than it is worth. Moreover, the fact that you go through paper and tape incredibly fast means that this level is very hard to enjoy.
In case you’re wondering, yes, you need to buy a ton of individual pieces of paper and tape over and over again during this level. And, yes, you have to place them all individually on the ground and then pick them up from the pile, because having them be directly added to your inventory made too much sense. But don’t worry, that’s not even the worst part. For whatever reason, the surrounding area is blocked in by stairs.
You naturally need to use the Cherry Picker to paint most of the robot, but the surrounding stairs mean that you’re going to constantly be bumping into them and tipping the goddamn thing over with frightening regularity. Why the devs had to include these stairs is completely and utterly beyond me, but they made a level that’s already frustrating due to how awful the Cherry Picker is, combined with constantly needing to buy things that much worse.
The robot mercifully only took me about 1.5 hours to paint, plus it’s interesting to look at, so at least it beats the bridge. But once it’s over, so is the campaign. When you’re done you can mess around in free play, allowing you to paint whatever you want within the levels (the first level is outside and gives you free reign of part of a street, which is fun!) But considering how few levels there are, even this can’t save Spray Paint Simulator. There’s supposedly more content coming, but considering how awful some of the currently existing stuff is, I’m not hopeful.
Spray Paint Simulator has the bones to make for a pretty serviceable PWS knockoff, but instead it doesn’t even really deserve to be uttered in the same breath. Between all the tedium and horrible focus on the Cherry Picker for nearly half of the playthrough, this game was simply far less enjoyable than it should be. With some more ease of use (don’t make us buy supplies constantly, please,) better controls, physics for the Cherry Picker, and significantly more content, this could be worth checking out. In its current state, you’d literally be better off watching paint dry.
Spray Paint Simulator: While the game's bones are just fine, the complete lack of content and some incredibly awful decisions make it far worse than it should have been. – Andrew Farrell
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