The Cleaner Review

The debut title from developer Dystopia Corp, The Cleaner takes influence from some heavy contenders in the world of action media. Previous indie-darlings SUPERHOT and Hotline Miami, as well as the Keanu Reeves thrillride that is the John Wick series, provide the building blocks of which The Cleaner is made out of, so why does it feel like less than the sum of its parts?

I’ll be honest with you: I have no idea where to start with The Cleaner. I’m writing this review hot off the heels of my Turbo Overkill preview experience, another fast-paced, action-packed, kill-em-all shooter, and I was so ready to sink my teeth into another satisfying death-filled romp. Instead, I got The Cleaner.

People should really be calling me The Decorator.

Thrust into the game with nary a suggestion of a proper story — something the game prides itself on — just a vague implication of you bringing down a ring of abusers and criminals, you spawn in a dingy corridor. With no real choice except to move forwards and pick up a pistol, you are soon faced with your first enemy. The game teaches you the basic functions like jump, crouch and right-click to put yourself into a SUPERHOT-esque bullet-time effect, where you can dodge the bullet from the enemy and return fire. You’re going to want to dodge those bullets too because a single one will kill you, a privilege that you aren’t afforded when returning fire. You won’t be reloading either, since your highly-trained killer of a character apparently never learned how to, meaning you’ll have to collect the guns of your felled enemies, akin to both of The Cleaners’ main influences, SUPERHOT and Hotline Miami.

I used the word “dingy” above to describe the corridor, but “dingy” is how I would describe pretty much every environment in The Cleaner. Even with a patch from the developer to rectify the issue, enemies are constantly draped in darkness, making them difficult to pinpoint if you’re playing at the recommended brightness settings. This, coupled with the need to pick up fresh guns in place of reloading, means that all momentum in a fight is lost when you’re stuck scouring the ground for a gun, like someone who’s lost a contact lens. What adds even more frustration to this are the absolutely ridiculous ragdoll physics applied to enemies when you kill them, making it feel like they could have tossed their weapon completely out of the level geometry, into the vastness of noclip-land.

You're gonna need a plumber with really good platforming experience to sort these pipes.

The Cleaner brands itself as a “die ‘n’ retry” game which is an apt description, because you will die, and you will retry. What bothers me, however, is not the rate of how much you die, but the circumstances under which you die. I love a solid challenge in a game, stemming from the Dark Souls series being one of my favourites and games like Hotline Miami and SUPERHOT which popularised the “die ‘n’ retry” shooter loop. The challenge in those games felt fair, with the gameplay mechanics acting as effective tools for you to better your abilities and progress, whereas the mechanics in The Cleaner feel like they’re actively working against you. You will die struggling to find a gun to replace the empty one in your hand, you will die trying to figure out where one of the enemies has moved to in the darkness, you will die falling into the void whilst trying to make awkward platforming jumps in pipe-filled rooms. The bullet-time ability is intended to help you fight enemies and make death-defying dodges and shots, but I instead found myself using it as a way to scout out the next room of enemies, slowing the pace of the game down to a crawl before I was inevitably shot dead by an extra enemy I didn’t quite see standing in the dark corner.

Oh yeah, worth noting that dying in The Cleaner sends you all the way back to the beginning of the level, a mechanic that worked fantastically well in SUPERHOT and Hotline Miami because of their short adrenaline-shot like segments, but when coupled with long levels full of slapdash enemy encounters and terrible platforming sections, causes nothing but frustration. Repeated deaths in the other games mentioned made me want to soldier on, but dying in The Cleaner made me want to quit the game permanently.

Ceiling Cleaner is watching you do crimes and stuff.

A broken clock is right twice a day though, right? There are moments of genuinely satisfying fights in The Cleaner. You’ll nail a room perfectly, with weapons landing just as you need them, making you legitimately feel like a pseudo-John Wick, but it’s a shame that the feeling doesn’t last for long. The satisfaction is often stopped short with a death and difficult to replicate on the following run. Sound and aesthetic is another area that the game gels well with. As mentioned, the lighting is a blight on the actual gameplay, but I understand the visual style that Dystopia Corp was going for with the neo-noir look. The soundtrack is relatively simple but works as a decent backing to the gameplay, whereas the effects of the gunshots give weight to your shots, with a nice little telltale clicking sound effect to signify your ammo is running low. The environments and visual style of The Cleaner in a slower genre of game would fare a lot better than the quick shooter it tries to be.