Roborock F25 Ace

As you can see in the video above, last year we took a look at Roborock's Flexi Pro, and it was actually the first time we here at Gamereactor had a completely positive experience with this new so-called "wet-dry" segment, which combines vacuuming and mopping in the same way as a modern robot vacuum cleaner.

It's been a year in the making, but Roborock is ready with a direct replacement, an update, and they call it the F25 Ace, and it does, again, many of the same things we are used to from this product segment. It's a traditional Dyson-style vacuum cleaner with a vacuum cleaner head that sucks up dust, dirt, and debris into a container, not a vacuum cleaner bag, but a mop roll that is wetted by water from another clean water container, which then washes the floor at the same time. The mop roller rotates and therefore provides the same effect, in theory, as if you use friction to scrub floors with soapy water.

There are many things to like about the F25 Ace, just like there was with the Flexi Pro. There's a built-in motor that makes a device that could have felt a bit heavy to push around suddenly light, and the included stand makes it seamless to charge between cleaning sessions. Even the angle of the Flexi Pro is back too, which means it can come all the way down and roll flat so you can get under even the lowest sofa.

And there's power too. The F25 Ace delivers 20,000Pa, which is nothing to sneer at, and thanks to a 4000mAh battery, you get around 60 minutes of continuous cleaning on a single charge and a recharge time of around six hours. That's not bad, especially when it also didn't make more than 70dB of noise in our test and only required water around every second while cleaning our ground floor thanks to the 740 millilitre clean water tank.

There's an extremely effective app too that helps you control how you... well, control the F25 Ace, and furthermore, the suction and scrubbing power is so impressive that it almost eliminates the need to give the floors a good scrub once in a while.

But there are kinks, still, and this is not specifically aimed at Roborock, but pretty much everyone who makes these wet-dry machines. It's still frustrating that because all the dirt you vacuum absolutely has to end up in the dirty wash water tank, it will mould almost instantly if you don't use the stand's built-in self-clean programme. This programme doesn't really help either, because in our case the contents mould after 24 hours anyway, so you have to empty one of the water containers after almost every cleaning. We have small children who throw food on the floor, so keep that in mind, but it's still frustrating to see this problem come back again and again.

That said, the F25 Ace is still the most efficient implementation of this specific idea, and if you're hooked on the concept of combining two cleaners into one and not paying too much more than a new Dyson, Roborock delivers again. They are truly a key player in this space, which is why Ace, despite a single point of criticism, is still a gold medal recommendation.