Spray Paint Simulator is coming to Game Pass, and it’s the antithesis of Power Wash Simulator. Grab your tape, put up your paper, and spray the day away as you listen to the same handful of tunes on the in-game radio. Despite a low map count, it’s a decently lengthy and enjoyable affair, with a cooperative free paint mode to boot.
Job Sim 101
Spray Paint Simulator has the most barebones of a setup and story. A guy is giving you some cash to start your spray-painting business. First, you’ll have a battery-powered sprayer, masking tape, paper, and paint. After working on a classic car, you’ll move to a mobster’s kitchen, spruce up an art museum, and work your way through the game’s seven levels.
It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the last few levels took me 3 to 5 hours each. Every job operates the same way. You’ll have to buy masking tape and paper, which you’ll then use to cover up every part of the job you’re not spraying. Once you’ve used your sprayer, ladders, scaffolding, and eventual cherry picker to get that job done, you’ll mask over the fresh paint and remove certain pieces to start the next part.
Rinse and repeat this until everything is painted its proper color and unmask it all to finish a level. In the free paint mode, it is exactly what it sounds like. You determine what colors you want to use and where, instead of following a set of instructions. There is an in-game radio that will shuffle through a handful of licensed songs (not big bands, think more YouTube instrumental tracks).
More Spraying Than A Cat In Heat
I jumped between Xbox and PC as this is an Xbox Play Anywhere title. The menu systems are a bit funky, as you need to navigate to continue or exit, and can’t just press a button. The right stick is your friend, not only for aiming but to highlight areas that need to be interacted with or painted over when you click it in. That aiming feels horrible by default, thankfully, some light tweaking to the camera speed helped slow things down enough to let me properly hit every nook and cranny.
On mouse and keyboard, the game is broken in the build I reviewed. Every few seconds the camera jumps 5 to 10 in-game feet when aiming with a mouse. I haven’t had this issue in any title and ended up using an Xbox controller because of it. Hopefully, it’s something they know about and either have fixed at launch or close to it.
Outside of the aiming quirks, the game controls reasonably well. You will use the B button to slouch, kneel, and get on your belly. These are key for finding every insane angle required to be able to paint every inch of an object to get that beautiful flash and ding. Much like other games in the genre, you need to reach 98% coverage to have an item be considered done. Once you get there, a bright flash and sound effect let you know it’s time to move on to the next piece.
A Colorful Presentation
Spray Paint Simulator is a decent-looking game. It ticks all the simulator boxes as far as asset quality and performance go. It isn’t great looking at any time, nor is it ugly. The one area I think detracts from the overall presentation is how the spray paint itself looks when coverage is low on an area. It’s a highly pixelated jumble of color on top of the texture that doesn’t look like paint at all. It’s an obvious recoloring of the original texture’s individual pixels and not any form of physics-based interaction.
This helps in the gameplay as getting an even coat or doing all the primers/etc. would not be enjoyable. It’s just a video game take on spray-painting, which is fine in the long run. I just wish they had figured out a way to make it look more like an actual painting when you were close to it. Do not make my mistake and leave the small nozzle on when you buy it, btw. I had a job that took 10 times longer than it should have because I didn’t realize that buying the nozzle automatically equipped it.
There’s no voice acting in the game, and as previously mentioned, a small number of tracks that will play on your in-game radio. I ended up putting a podcast on or my music. The in-game audio was fine, it just became highly repetitive on the 5th loop through on one job. The only issues outside of that were the game having a few objects that were incredibly difficult to finish painting. The door in the kitchen level required an entire bucket of paint, and me trying to hit it from every angle with every nozzle I had before the final few percent were finally registered.
Wrapping Things Up
Spray Paint Simulator is decent fun. I do not know if the devs have any DLC planned post-launch. As is, there is enough here once you’re done, I think most will have enjoyed their time and be ready to move on.
Spray Paint Simulator
Played on
Xbox Series X and Xbox PC
PROS
- Colorful Presentation
- Zen-like Experience
- Just long enough
CONS
- Have to tinker with control settings
- Some objects are a pain to 100%
