New Year’s Eve 1999, your crew is getting together to drink and reminisce about their careers. What do you guys do? Well, you are professional cleaners for the mob! Serial Cleaners is a stylish stealth-action game where you have to sneak around buildings and get past police while cleaning up the joint for your boss. Vacuum up, pack up bodies, and dispose of evidence…I promise this is more fun than it sounds. But, will you be able to clean up on your Steam Deck?
Serial Cleaners: Max Settings
When set to the max, Serial Cleaners chugs along. It can hit around 55 FPS, but it dips down as soon as you move. This also comes with a steep 24.5W drain that can waste the battery down to 1.5 hours. But we can easily make this much better with some tweaking!
With just some simple tweaking, Serial Cleaners feels like a great improvement without many sacrifices.
A Clean Optimization
Through my testing, I found a nice balance I am pretty happy with. At 55 FPS, 1024×576 with FSR Sharpness 1, a mix of high and medium settings, and a 75% render scale made the game feel incredible while still looking sharp and sleek. I was also able to get around a 11W – 15W drain for a 3 – 3.5 hour battery.
This framerate felt just as good as 60 FPS and it did give the ability to save a lot of battery while still looking great.
We also wanted to find a way to get a 1280×720 resolution with a 100% render scale. Luckily, we were able to do it, but did make some cuts to make sure battery life wasn’t super overwhelming. We dropped the framerate to 50 FPS, which with a TDP limit of 12, allowed us to stay below 20W drain on average with crisp visuals.
I did notice that in every build we tried, there were some framerate fluctuations. In our recommended build, this was curbed a bit, but still happened every now and than. It never got bad enough to be unplayable though!
Menu Control Issues
While Serial Cleaners itself didn’t seem to have any issues when controlling characters, the menus had an odd one. Using the D-pad to control the menu and it didn’t work. I learned that using the analog stick worked perfectly and using the D-pad right after worked just fine as well. I tend to prefer using the pad in menus, so this felt odd, but it is very minor in the grand scheme.
Conclusion
Serial Cleaners is a really interesting game. It can be a bit on the short side, but if you enjoy top-down stealth games, you will enjoy this one. And on Deck, it runs pretty damn well. Even with the very minor fluctuations, the game can hit the higher framerates while still looking great and keeping a decent battery life. Overall, the fact that this can run so well on Deck makes this a sweeping success!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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