Spray Paint Simulator Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

Spray Paint Simulator wants to add an extra coating to PowerWash Simulator’s gleaming exterior, but also fails to provide the emulsion needed to make it shine. On the surface, it looks a lot like your typical scrub-and-soak nozzle-based sim, but beneath its familiar mechanisms and rainbow pizzazz is a paint pot that’s desperate for a thicker extract. The levels are short, and the pot in question runs dry long before you get your brush wet. And sadly, this is just the beginning of a crusty imitation that, annoyingly, makes the act of watching paint dry a lot worse than it is in real life. Go figure.

At the heart of Spray Paint Simulator is a vibrant chore core experience, and one that dares to be bold with its somewhat monotonous grafting style and one-note elements. It takes the basic idea of PowerWash Simulator, and it settles on the notion that, if, say, a player is willingly giving their cash to a studio to do something as mundane as scrub roundabouts for four hours, then there’s nothing to say that they won’t do the same in an alternate universe. It rolls with that forward momentum, and it lays its cards on the table, somehow forgetting the most important rule of thumb en route: chore core work needs to feel satisfying.

As it turns out, spraying colorful rainbow belts on all sorts of objects isn’t the best solution for keeping your stress levels at an all-time low. Frankly, you would have more luck with whittling down your turbulent emotions by simply watching a series of ASMR clips or, failing that, a professional carpenter at work. Why? Well, because Spray Paint Simulator isn’t so much of a therapeutic tool as it is a burden with bubblegum brushstrokes. It looks great, but with a lack of substance and a ton of bugs and dull features, it also fails to capture the beating heart of a genuinely captivating sludge-and-scrub escapade. And that’s putting it mildly, believe it or not.

Like Watching Paint Dry

Spray Paint Simulator paints a simple career path for you to pursue—a breadcrumb trail of blots and color combinations, monolithic set pieces and scaffolding-based dilemmas. At the core of all of these vibrant blemishes and oddly irritating curveballs is a fairly generic gameplay loop that you would have seen a dozen or so times before. Similar in design to the likes of PowerWash Simulator and Leaf it Alone, it mainly consists of nozzles and attachments, mundane walls and fidgety components. Unlike the aforementioned duo, however, Spray Paint Simulator has a few extra precautionary measures for you to juggle, none of which, annoyingly, add to the experience.

While the purpose of the game is about as black and white as the world itself, the act of painting it and “bringing color to its mediocre palette” is filled with a lot of inkblots and tedious stepping stones. For example, in order to paint key areas in the few levels that the career mode has to offer, you essentially have to manually apply masking tape to specific frames and, on occasion, install scaffolding to reach certain areas. Granted, this doesn’t sound like too much of a hassle on paper, yet the game does sadly make it so that completing this routine is not only monotonous, but painfully long-winded and without merit.

Unfortunately, Spray Paint Simulator just isn’t that relaxing to work through. It isn’t that it lacks any sign of meditative quality; it’s that it pours so much effort into filling your brain with unnecessary tasks and pointless grafts that, when it does finally come to the act of painting the world, you lose all interest and forget to truly enjoy it. And sadly, that applies to most of the career mode and the tasks, in general.

Don’t get me wrong, Spray Paint Simulator isn’t the magnolia molten of paint jobs, though it does lack a certain kind of pizzazz to make the canvas look and, more importantly, feel good to smother in several shades of gloop. It’s a lot of fun at first, truly, but that initial novelty factor soon wears thin after the first layer has been applied. After that, it transitions into a rather monotonous experience that lacks heart and soul, polish and vigor.

Verdict

Spray Paint Simulator fancies itself as a colorful contender for PowerWash Simulator’s throne with its similar gameplay mechanics and progression tropes, but also fails to match the emulsion of its adversary with a surprisingly shallow career mode with a lack of stages and a plethora of monotonous textures that, sadly, add little to no benefit to the game whatsoever.

Swilled with a short-changed selection of levels and an incredibly dull stepping stone procedure, Spray Paint Simulator immediately struggles to find its feet and make that all-important impression. Don’t get me wrong, it shows just the faintest glimmer of hope during its initial bout, but then derails and slips into murky grey waters shortly thereafter, leaving you to mop up whatever joy there is an otherwise grayscale biome of irritating design choices and painful tasks. And that’s a shame, because it could have amounted to so much more. However, given that it doesn’t enhance the notion that watching paint dry is a lot better than it sounds, it does sadly fall short at the first hurdle. A wasted opportunity, really.

Let it be said that, if you do enjoy switching off to generic virtual chores, then you might just be able to find something to write home about here. If, however, you’re desperately looking to wheedle your wax into a game that hits all of the same notes as PowerWash Simulator, then you might be surprised at just how little this world brings to the paint pot. It’s a place to dab your brush, but it isn’t somewhere that you would want to venture back to after clocking out. Sorry, North Star.