Emergency Cleanup Co. ★★★☆☆

I played the demo for Emergency Cleanup Co. and wasn’t a huge fan of it, however I received an email with a code to try the early access out and since a demo doesn’t always represent the full game, I really wanted to give it another try, and I’m happy I did so.

You can see the growth, honestly.

Keep in mind, this review is for the early access portion of the game, and also, thank you so much to Smallroom for gifting me an early access key.

• Casual
• Family Friendly
• Multiplayer
• Simulation
• Singleplayer

Where can you buy?

• Available on Steam

Explanation to Negative Feedback

Not a whole lot of places

You get three places to choose to clean up whenever you finish with a former clean-up job, which is all well and good since you can decide for yourself where you want to go next, but after enough times, the places start to repeat.

And there are two different movie theatres with slightly different layouts, which I found a little odd.

If you’re going to do clean-up for two different places for people to watch movies, why not make one an indoor theatre, and another one like those outdoor drive-thru theatres where you watch a screen from your car.

I’m sure those places need a good cleaning as well.

And even if the theatres are slightly different, just going to the same house or the same beach after having completed it becomes a bit dull and loses that feel-good feeling of cleaning the environment. Since, y’know, you’ve already cleaned it before.

Payment seems kind of low

Let’s take the house that took a beating from a house party.

The e-mail is that it’s very, very urgent, because it’s a last-minute clean-up job, and even though you’ll be getting paid 400 florins, that equals out to around 222 USD, and even though that still sounds pretty good…understand that this place is a MESS.

It takes a while to clean. It takes several trash bags to clean and uses our equipment multiple times–and let’s not forget that this is a rush job.

They need this house cleaned before the parents come back, which would only jack up the price even higher than it already is.

I don’t know. It’s a delicate process trying to put a price on cleaning and buying things, but some of the places are a little crazy low for payments. Being a rookie, I’d get it, but as we clean we should be able to get more of a reputation and receive a higher pay because of it.

Maybe that’s something they’ll implement later?

Upgrades are only available after certain jobs

I had enough money to pay for equipment that was past the next one in the list and I couldn’t get it. The shop gatekeeps the equipment and won’t allow you to buy things out of order, which is more than a little annoying.

You’re telling me I have to pay for something that’s not as good as the thing that’s a lot better that I have the money for at the moment?

I don’t understand the logic of it.

Explanation to Positive Feedback

Minimap for messes

I don’t think I really bothered to look at the minimap all that much until I couldn’t find a certain dirty area to clean for my 100% completion.

But just know, depending on the equipment you’re currently using to clean, that’s the mess that’s going to be shown on the minimap. Which means it’s not going to be completely overrun with trash clusters of all types, even though sometimes it looks that way given how much throw-away garbage and glass stains there might be around you.

Multiple ways to clean

This isn’t a game where you’re just going to go around picking up trash–though that’s the vast majority of it. Instead, you are given various equipment to deal with different tasks, such as a sponge for cleaning surface stains, a vacuum (yes, that includes roombas), and a steam cleaner.

You’re cleaning a variety of areas for different reasons, so it’s good to have different choices for different messes.

You can sling the trash bags

Yes, you can throw the trash bags toward the trash can and hope you can slam dunk them in–or at least get close to it. I love this, because it means you don’t have to run from one messy area back to the trash can and back again.

You can just toss the trash close enough to the can and walk back over there to place them in all at once to save a whole lot of time.

Links Worth Checking Out

Nothing here