Recycling Center Simulator Review

Recycling Center Simulator is an addictive simulator game in which you clean up abandoned plots and buildings and sell/recycle the trash you find. It takes around 23 hours to complete and has no missable achievements. One achievement is very grindy.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 23 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, the achievement of earning 1 million is so long, took me 12 hours of grinding after finishing the rest
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting, but it isn’t hard
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I’m such a sucker for simulation games in which you start off doing everything yourself but work up your way to let NPCs take over some of the boring tasks. Recycling Center Simulator does a great job with this. First off you start with going to trash sides to clean them up, go back to your company building, sort all the stuff by what kind of trash it is, and then put them in machines to smelt them and be able to sell them on the market. Before you go to a trash site you also want to negotiate the price of being allowed to clean up there and take the stuff back to your company.

Gladly already in the tutorial, you get an employee to sort out the trash for you, which is one of the game’s most boring tasks. However, you want to do it 10 times yourself for 2 achievements. I enjoyed the pacing in Recycling Center Simulator, as it is such a treat to also get the lockpicking skill and the crowbar to be able to earn extra cash on many trash sites. And by the time you’re done to go to those sites yourself, you will have one or more employees who can go for you, while you work on selling the recycled stuff. My favorite upgrade is the robot that will put pallets into the storage for you.

I might be old school, but I was so impressed that the screens on the machinery gave live updates on the progress and what you set them to do without having to open the screen. So if you just want to check that they are still going, you can do that by just walking by them and quickly heck the screen without having to click on it to open the menu. I wish that later on you could put the numbers of tasks for the first- and second-tier machinery on higher numbers, as the max amount of tasks it can do is 100 and you can queue up 3 processes (to do the same thing or different things).

The achievements take around 23 hours. There are no missable achievements and most of them are really easy or stuff you would do anyway like buying the higher tier machinery or going to trash sites. There are also achievements for your reputation level, but this goes up with cleaning sites, selling trash and buying factory upgrades. There is one very grindy achievement and that is earning 1 million coins. This one alone took me around 12 hours, with mostly idle play. I sent out my employees to clean trash sites and went to bed at 12 pm already to skip to the next day. As by then the employees have returned and put their found trash in the sorting machine. Only once in a few days I did run the sorting machine and put the trash in the machinery to recycle it. And after that, bargaining for the highest possible prices for goods I could make. I rarely did anything with paper, except make envelopes… as only being able to put 10 items on one pallet just sucks.

I give Recycling Center Simulator 4 out of 5 stars.

This review for Recycling Center Simulator was written on 26 November 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 32 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.