JUSTICE SUCKS: Tactical Vacuum Action

My first hour with JUSTICE SUCKS felt like the universe had finally made a game specifically for the part of my brain that refuses to take anything seriously. You are Dusty McClean, a self-aware robotic vacuum cleaner with a family to protect and a grudge to settle against the megalithic FamilyCorp. After a catastrophic run-in with the company's warranty squad sends you hurtling into the living room television, the bulk of the game plays out inside a 90s TV dimension, equal parts cartoon fever dream and ultraviolent stealth puzzle. It's the kind of premise that sounds like a pitch meeting joke until you're deep in it, genuinely invested in a sentient disc on wheels. The core loop is a top-down stealth game where hacking household appliances is your primary weapon. Freezers slam shut on guards, light switches send jolts through puddles, ovens erupt on cue. Dusty is fragile enough that direct confrontation is rarely the smart move, so you spend your time darting between furniture, ducking into vents, reading enemy vision cones, and setting up chain reactions. The blood your enemies leave behind isn't just atmosphere; it powers Dusty's special abilities. Sucking up gore with a Kirby-style suction refills your resource bar, which you spend on moves like summoning Sexy McClean for a diving punch, or triggering a room-wide hack that resets every trap simultaneously. Three loadout slots let you mix passive perks (expanded hack radius, passive blood gain while hidden) with active abilities before each mission, giving the game a small but satisfying pre-mission ritual. Mission variety is a genuine strength. Elimination runs, family escort objectives, bomb defusal, and dedicated Cleaning Frenzy missions where you race the clock to suck up every last body part all take place across seven or so distinct environments: the McClean family home, a cruise ship, a nightclub, an airport, and FamilyCorp's headquarters among them. Each setting rewards exploration, and returning to earlier levels with later-unlocked abilities to chase leaderboard scores is a legitimate reason to replay. The gated progression system is the one structural wrinkle most reviewers flag; occasionally you need to grind a prior level to unlock the next one, which briefly interrupts momentum. It's minor, but noticeable in a game that otherwise keeps pace well. The active abilities can also fade from memory mid-mission since the environmental traps are so satisfying that you rarely feel forced to dig into the full toolkit. What carries JUSTICE SUCKS above its modest scope is the craft stitched into every corner of it. Samurai Punk, a Melbourne-based indie studio, built something with a visual personality that genuinely evokes a 90s Saturday morning cartoon pushed through a violence filter. The sound design is equally considered: the soundtrack leans into a boyband-adjacent retro-funk energy that hits oddly right for the setting, and the dedicated cleaning song that plays during Frenzy missions has no business being as charming as it is. Dusty himself is an expressive little machine, his digital eyes narrowing to aim, burning bright with bloodlust, communicating personality without a single line of dialogue. If you bounced off the shorter, rougher prequel Roombo: First Blood, this is the expanded and polished version of that idea. It's not demanding your full weekend, but it's intentional and warm in all the ways small indie games can be when a studio cares more about the joke landing perfectly than about feature bloat. Worth your time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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