Car Washer: Summer of the Ninja Demo

Everyone had one or more rough summers in between school sessions, prolly because teens do not have too many options at their disposal when it comes to acquiring cash. Summer jobs never pay enough to satisfy the many wishes of a high schooler, and most of them require a lot of hard work anyway. Hence, it’s always a struggle between procrastinating and not buying the stuff you want, versus working hard and potentially wasting your summer break on a job.

Car Washer: Summer of the Ninja is a casual game designed to portray this rough period in a teenager's life. In short, you play the role of a boy that opens a small car wash for some extra cash, only to find out that his moderate success attracts the attention of a rival company. To make matters even worse, this company employs exclusively ninjas, which makes them a pretty tough competitor.

It is worth noting right from the start that this is a rather simple and lazy game, in the sense that it needed a lot more work before being presented to the public. Almost every aspect is lackluster in some way, starting with the gameplay, all the way to graphics and replay value. There is not enough variety to keep the player engaged for longer than a few minutes, and the humor attempts fall flat as well.

The gameplay recipe is quite simple: cars come to you in an orderly fashion, and you have to use a hose, a sponge or a variety of other tools to clean them. You unlock more tools the better you manage to do, but things get a tad more complicated after a certain point. Ninjas make an appearance, and they try their best to disrupt your activities and slow you down to a crawl.

The annoying part is that you are basically looking at the same image for very long periods of time, with nothing changing in between. You’d think that at least the cars you wash are different, but that doesn’t happen, at least not quickly enough to avoid boredom. Moving from side to side without any kind of system to let you know how much work you’ve got left is yet another mistake. Feedback is important, especially in games that supposedly encourage good time management.

Car Washer: Summer of the Ninja still has a chance to turn into something good, but it needs a bit of retouching. Everything is just too slow and dull most of the time, and that’s not what people what to experience in a video game.