As a new spray painter in the town of Spatterville you are offered a series of jobs by the friendly residents. Starting with a car, a kitchen (from someone who looks a lot like Tony Soprano, so you better not mess it up), a bus, an art studio–the jobs get bigger and trickier.
If this initial scenario sounds familiar then it's because just about every other sim introduces you to the game this way, and if the gameplay looks familiar then it's because it's worryingly similar to Square Enix's PowerWash Simulator–you're just spray painting instead of cleaning stuff with a pressure washer.
The gameplay is simple and fairly instinctive, movement is on the left stick and you look/aim your spray nozzle with the right stick. You can jump with "Y" and crouch with "B". You spray with the right trigger, a flashlight is on the left trigger (which you need for shadowy corners), pick up/place/use items with "X" and "A". I was glad to find that you can lock the sprayer "on" by pressing "LB" before spraying–very handy on big jobs.
You need to equip yourself with a spray gun (well, duh), paint, masking tape and paper. One job requires filler for repairs. High surfaces are reached by steps, mini scaffold towers or the "Cherry Picker"–the best & worst thing about Spray Paint Simulator (because it's incredibly maneuverable and extremely tricky to master the controls of.) Once you've masked everything the job requires you can start painting, and obviously some jobs require more than one colour, so once the first colour is applied you'll be masking again-and possibly again and again. You can move supplies (tins of paint, masking tape & paper) to handy spots and even place them on a scaffold tower (or the Cherry Picker when unlocked) for easier access.
Run out of paint supplies and you can visit the store, and some jobs will take several tins of paint, rolls of masking tape and paper. A couple of better spray guns become available as you progress, and really do make covering the larger areas easier. You can also customise your painter's gear, but when you can't see it yourself I don't really see the point.
As I mentioned earlier, some jobs require different parts to be painted different colours. To do this you need to spray in several passes, masking and unmasking as required. If this sounds complicated it's really not, and clicking "R3" (the right stick) will helpfully show you what needs doing at each stage of the paint job by making missed parts glow white.
Although one job (the Iron Bridge) took us over 5 hours to complete, there are only 7 jobs in total–although more are promised. There are only 2 modes, Career and Free Spray, and we were hugely disappointed that the multiplayer mode was restricted to Free Spray, which means you can invite a friend to what is likely to be no more than a chaotic practice spray on any job you've completed in career mode. We managed a quick session with our assistant editor and got bored very quickly having painted a car and done rude graffiti on the customer's garage door. So... when one of the jobs has been known to take someone over 7 hours to complete, the big question has to be: why no career multiplayer co-op mode?
Spray Paint Simulator is available on Game Pass right now, or for a price of £12.49 (£11.24 with Game Pass). You pretty much get what you pay for–several hours of cathartic, if disappointing and repetitive painting action that somehow manages less fun and less satisfying than the similar gameplay of PowerWash Simulator.
Many thanks to North Star Games and Whitethorn Games for the review code.