Serial Cleaners Review

Serial Cleaners is a great stealth game in which you clean the crime scene after terrible stuff has happened. I love it but I miss a chapter selection, which results in the game having missable achievements. 10h to 100%.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, cleaning up all the blood in each level is missable
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: Yes, while the DLC isn’t even released
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I love love love the first title in this series, Serial Cleaner. So I came to this newest edition in the series with a lot of hype, but I also was afraid the hype would be too much and that I would be let down. Gladly I can say I wasn’t let down, what an amazing game!

I see a lot of people talking about how stupid the cops act in this game, and that it is very gamy, but yeah it is a game. I wouldn’t expect much else tbh. I wonder how many of those people that give the game a bad review because the cops are stupid tried to clean up all the blood on each level as that is the biggest challenge in Serial Cleaners.

I loved this new look compared to the first title, but it made it sometimes hard to spot everything. It also had a few confusing levels where you could see through the floor and that made it a bit confusing. I also got into trouble sometimes with the environment. Not being able to enter a hiding spot because the prompt didn’t pop up. Overall I prefer this look a lot more and they did a great job going from a top-down game to a 3d game.

The story was okay, it was a nice way to see them remembering their first introduction with Bob, the original serial cleaner, and after that their best and last jobs. While a level is loading at the bottom of the screen you get some information about the level that is loading, but because it was on a spot where in most games you get “tooltips” I sometimes forgot to read there and just clicked continue the moment I could. It would have been nice to see this more in the middle of the screen and maybe even with a voice-over.

One other thing I have to call out because I can’t even believe this is the case is that it doesn’t have a level selection (at this point). I just assumed before I bought this game that it would have, because why not? And the previous game had it. At least one achievement is missable because of this feature missing and that is the achievement in which you have to clean all the blood in each level. If you love achievement hunting I would highly recommend focussing on this one from the beginning, when you’ve done it in a level an animation at the bottom of the screen will pop up for a few seconds, it looks like a “Mr cleaner” commercial figure.

Other achievements to keep in mind is to use the special abilities of the 3 new people at least 10 times (Hacking, spraying tags, and chopping up people with the big guy). I think that are all the missable achievements. In the last chapter, I did clean up all the blood while playing as Hal, even when there wasn’t a blood meter on the top of the screen. Too afraid to miss out on the achievement if it somehow would count. And I choose to do Bob’s story last in the final level, not sure if that matters but mentioning it in case it does.

All in all, I really enjoyed Serial Cleaners so much, I hope there will be a third installment as I love what this game does. I played through it in quite a short time and grabbed every moment I could to go back to the game to get further. It doesn’t overstay its welcome with a 10h gameplay (when you clean everything), shorter if you just go for the objectives. And that is great, I love it when games value your time and don’t drag things out when that serves no purpose.

This review for Serial Cleaners was written on 24 Oktober 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 18 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.