Garbage Crew! Review

You’ve always had dreams of being a garbage man or woman, right? Well, I’m guessing not, but collecting and getting rid of trash with a team of four players instantly makes it sound better. Garbage Crew! is a multiplayer game that lets you play with friends and family locally, or online with people you know using Steam’s Remote Play Together. There is a single-player mode, and updates have been made to make it more balanced, but playing with others will offer a lot more fun and chaos.

The main goal of Garbage Crew! seems simple enough; collect garbage cans and dumpsters, load them onto the truck to be emptied, then put them back where you found them. The dumpsters are hard to move on your own, so it’s best to team up and work together as it will go a lot faster. The driver of the garbage truck is impatient, so he will never stop moving. Unless something is obstructing the road like a fallen log or one of your comrades is standing in the way.

At first, it looks like the truck is moving quite slowly, so you will think it will be easy to get the cans loaded and emptied so that you can place them back where you picked them up. It would be easy if dumping the garbage wasn’t so ridiculously slow. By the time the bin was emptied and it was brought back down for you to grab and place back on the icon, chances are the screen has moved past the drop-off point, or you are not sure which highlighted location is the proper one for that can. If you carry it there and it’s right, you will see arrows pointing down. If it’s not right, then you have wasted a ton of time. Garbage Crew! doesn’t do a good job of telling you if you have done the correct thing or not, a sound effect or any kind of confirmation would have been nice.

To make matters more tricky, you are apparently also a firefighter, so while collecting trash you will see houses burning and will need to grab the water hose attachment on your truck to try and put it out; all the while the truck is still moving along and garbage still needs to be collected. Even with four people, we were not able to complete even the first level on the easy setting.

The visual look of Garbage Crew! reminded me of titles like Human Fall Flat, but didn’t feel as refined, giving it a weird Nintendo 64 look. There were a variety of characters to select from at the beginning, all with different hairstyles and outfits, which was nice. The music wasn’t memorable at all and the main sound effect you are going to be hearing is the garbage truck horn. The driver constantly honks when there is something blocking the road until you move it, which gets incredibly irritating if you are trying to move large objects like a log in the way.

The requirements to complete the level are crazy considering this should be an introduction level, especially when there is a time limit. I can’t imagine what the harder difficulties are like! Since you have multiple tasks to do, there are a lot of different controls that you will need to learn, like how to pick up garbage cans, attach them to the truck, empty them, grab the hose, and spray the water. Garbage Crew! has multiple tutorial screens that show you what you need to do in each situation, but they only appear before you start playing the stage. So chances are, you will forget exactly what to do when that situation arises. Hitting the required buttons didn’t feel crisp and responsive like they should. I shouldn’t have to spam the button just to get the lifter to dump out the trash.

The concept for Garbage Crew! is a fun one, and I think with some changes, it could become a fun multiplayer title to check out. Right now, it feels like the speed required to complete tasks takes way too long, messing up everything else you need to do. Plus, do we really need to be firefighting garbage collectors, can’t we just focus on the one thing until we get good at it? I feel adding in the fire parts would be better as a bonus level or something like that. Currently, this title is hard to recommend, unless you really want a challenge. For my family, the experience of playing Garbage Crew! wasn’t a fun one.