Cleaning is a mundane job that nobody really likes to do. Cleaning is repetitive and I admire people that clean for a living. Well, Dustforce is a unique game that makes cleaning “fun”. You play the role of four janitors willing to keep things clean from dust, leaves and grime forever. Cleaning in Dustforce is a much more fun experience than in real life, and it’s surprisingly a unique game in itself.
Dustforce looks and plays like any other 2D platform style of game, but your task isn’t killing bad guys it’s cleaning the levels as best you can. The game starts off with a tutorial showing you the most effective ways you can clean up the levels that are in the game. Dustforce may sound like an easy game on paper, but rest assured it’s an addictive yet difficult game that will keep you occupied for hours on end.
Dustforce’s controls and gameplay mechanics are what separate it from most other video games out there. This is because the four janitors that you control are highly acrobatic and can clean the levels as if they’re like ninjas. You can climb on walls, jump really high, dash in mid-air and more. The level design is excellent because they are made to make you use all of the abilities that the janitors have. If you did not follow the tutorial properly the first time, you may need to play through it again because there are numerous time that the levels will keep testing you. This is not the kind of game you can breeze through once and never play again that’s for sure.
Although Dustforce is all about cleaning all the dust and dirt that is ruining the levels in the game, another main goal you have to think about is how stylish you are at “cleaning”. At the end of each level you get ranked on two things: completion and finesse.
Completion is straightforward because it ranks on how much dust/dirt you have eradicated in each level. The finesse ranks on how stylish you were while you were cleaning the level. This depends on how well you used the “combo meter” and also how fast you were able to complete the level too. The ranking goes from D to A. You can also get an S ranking if you were able to execute a perfect combo and/or if you 100% cleaned all of the dirt/dust in a level.
One thing that I thought made the game fun and non-linear is the fact that you can select which levels you want to do first. After you have done the tutorial, you can roam the unique main menu to select which world you want to enter in. Once you have entered a specific world, a new hub opens where you can select which level you want to play. I love the freedom you have in Dustforce to tackle which level you want to do first because it made the game less linear and boring. Even if I found myself stuck on a specific level, I could always do another level and tackle it another time. It’s less frustrating than if the game had a more linear level structure if you had to complete them in a specific order.
