I was recently given the pleasure of reviewing Serial Cleaner from iFun4All (developer) and Curve Digital (publisher). Serial Cleaner stars (as the name implies) crime scene cleaner Bob Leaner. Bob begins to take on jobs for his friends in the Mafia and eventually a mysterious accomplice of the talked about Echo Killer. Deep in debt and a world of darkness later, Bob finds himself against all the odds as he’s trying to both clean his debt and his name from both Mafia and Murderer alike.
Graphics
The Graphics of Serial Cleaner represent that of the era the game takes place in. Being set in the 1970’s, Serial Cleaner manages to replicate the popular color palette of days past capturing the creams, browns, yellows, etc. while bringing it to a modern day styling with a top down camera as well.
The graphics get a 6.
Sound
The music of Serial Cleaner is one of the best things about the game. The soundtrack takes influence of bands such as Kiss and Led Zepplin while also catching the stylings of Jazz influenced 70’s cop shows such as Kojak and Starsky and Hutch. Serial Cleaner not only takes note of the retro color scheme of that time but also replicates the sound of the time via the soundtrack.
However, while the soundtrack is great, the game is text heavy and sadly there’s quite a lot of reading of dialogue that you have to do in between missions. Serial Cleaner could’ve done well with some voice acting because it contains quite a story, but we get just grunts from officers and minimal audio effects in the game.
The sound gets a 7.5
Gameplay
The gameplay of Serial Cleaner is mostly cat and mouse stealth play with you extra objectives thrown in each level. Each level requires you to collect evidence, clean up blood and dump the bodies in body drop zones located on the map. While you do that you usually have to work with elements in the level, which could be dodging the police, utilizing shortcuts and making distractions for yourself to move. All of this must be achieved while the difficulty and timing begins to get tougher throughout the game.
Although all of that sounds pretty simple to do throughout each level, It’s hard to make this possible sometimes because the A.I jumps either from being incredibly incompetent and not knowing how to find you to being supercop and detecting you quickly out of nowhere. The A.I for Serial Cleaner is either awful or too good for its merit.
The gameplay gets a 6.5
Story
The story of Serial Cleaner is written well. You first start off with slow small jobs for your mafia friends and eventually get a mystery client who you take on for more strange jobs. As you progress throughout the story and begin to plan your exit from the business, you get dragged back in after you start to chalk up a serious debt to your mafia friends. The only way to get out is to do work with the mysterious client who has ties and connection to the notorious Echo Killer you continuously hear about throughout the game.
The Story gets a 8.
Verdict
Before hand I had no idea what Serial Cleaner consisted of, that’s always the guessing game with a lot of smaller titles. However, what I got was a surprising title that came with a cool art style, a very impressive soundtrack, incredibly fun gameplay and an impressive story that topped off an already robust package. But where Serial Cleaner shines at amazingly, it’s also dragged down by some wonky A.I and long scripts of dialogue which hamper an already solid game. Personally, I was amazed on what Serial Cleaner had to offer; You might feel the same when you begin to play the game yourself.
