Recycling Center Simulator is a business management sim that charges you with the responsibility of maintaining a recycling operation in a nondescript city. Many simulator games are known for having tons of obtuse controls that put players into stressful situations for micromanagement tasks or else for providing a relaxing environment to do some repetitive tasks while grinding away.
Recycling Center Simulator falls distinctly into a third category, as you’ll be collecting waste and sorting, shredding, and repurposing it into products you can sell to earn cash.
Recycling Center Simulator is available right now on Steam, and it’s even being updated with new content like a brand new bunch of machines that you can add to your facility that produce valuable biogas from all the garbage that you can feed them.
Plot Ahoy!
As the manager of a recycling enterprise, you’ll sign contracts, collect trash, buy and maintain your processing machines, hire staff, and produce all sorts of new products out of the waste of yesteryear. Your primary goal is to set up your operation to be as efficient as possible so you can turn a variety of discarded plastic into new bottles, pipes, box containers, and more. Seeing as how Recycling Center Simulator is a simulation title, don’t expect any story developments: you’re in this for the love of the game… or money.
Review Notes
The gameplay of Recycling Center Simulator is straightforward, just like you’d expect a simulator-style title to be. You go from location to location to collect trash and throw it into your truck. You essentially haggle to get the lowest prices to come pick up the garbage, and then you’ll spend the time retrieving all objects you can find from the area and placing them in your truck however you like. You have a maximum carry limit and can only carry one larger item at a time, so you’ll be making multiple trips while you scour old diners and parking lots for trash.
After collecting waste, you will need to sort everything you’ve brought back with you. In a minigame of sorts, garbage will come down a conveyor line which will require you drag the trash to its intended receptacle. Each time you click on a piece of garbage, it will gain an outline that makes it easy to know whether an object is paper, plastic, or some other material, as you’ll mostly be matching the colors of the outlines to the collection cans. This particular step is a lot of mindless clicking and dragging, though thankfully you can have an employee take care of it for you if you find it less engaging.
Once the trash has been sorted, you carry the bin to the appropriate processing machine. For example, a paper shredder will shred paper materials and provide loads of pressed papers that can be recycled into other products that you can sell. This effectively is the gameplay loop: collect garbage, sort the trash, break it down into materials, and then use those materials to create products that earn you money. Rinse and repeat this process while hiring staff to automate these processes, buying newer and better machines and things like that.
You can hire workers and assign them to do various parts of your tasks, which can be a godsend if you don’t want to collect trash or do the sorting afterwards, but would rather mess with the machines and set up conveyors. Effectively, the ultimate end goal of Recycling Center Simulator is setting the game up to automate as much of the tasks as possible, or at least that was where I was deriving my fun. You unlock robots later who can move pallets worth of products or materials too. Combine all of these factors together with conveyor belts to feed the material from one machine into another so you don’t have to manually move everything yourself, and you can create a very Dollar Store Factorio type of experience in this title.
Of course, that is if you enjoy these types of simulator titles where you predominantly do the same, repetitive tasks for lengthy periods of time to see a number go up (in this case, your bank account). This does mean, however, that for hours of your play time, you’ll be performing repetitive actions like left-clicking to pick up every piece of detritus in an abandoned business, so having maybe even just the ability to hold left-click would be appreciated in a further update (because the current method may cause repetitive stress injuries with how much you have to left click).
It’s always fun to see the fruits of your labor presented with you having to do fewer of the manual tasks you may not specifically enjoy, as I wasn’t huge into sorting waste after returning to the recycling center or moving materials or product around one container at a time. Being able to automate many of those things helps you make money faster, which is important since new machines can be prohibitively expensive and waste repurposing doesn’t exactly pay the best.
TLDR
Recycling Center Simulator is precisely what it says on the tin. You manage a recycling center and handle all of the tasks yourself, to start. Soon, your recycling empire will grow gradually, and it’s nice and rewarding to see yourself shifting from predominantly doing one type of task to another as you hire workers and new machines to shred or compact garbage into usable products you can sell. If you’re not the type of player who enjoys doing repetitious tasks for monetary gain, then perhaps stay away from Recycling Center Simulator. For those who enjoy a nice, relaxing period of time to just turn the brain off and grind at the end of a workday or something, you could do a lot worse than Recycling Center Simulator.