Another Brick in the Mall

« Quotation forthcoming. »

« Przyjemna gra. Można zbudować dużo sklepów w tym kina, centra fitness, bary i fast foody. Dużo obiektów. Wadą gry jest grafika 2D oraz brak budowy wielopoziomowych budnków. »

« According to the description you are building a mall. It will feature several different departments, and you will have to manage the building, products, parking space, hire and fire personnel and even deal with thieves. And all of that is technically there. Just like it was when I played it years ago when it just came out into Early Access. I honestly don't know what they've done in the meantime, but they certainly ignored every little bit of feedback they got. The "simulation" is still a joke: A "customer" decides to go your mall to buy *one* product. He will decide what that product is based on some general data that is supposed to be "demand" and that is, apart from some seasonal events, completely arbitrary. Your customer will then move towards the shelve that has that product, and in a *good* simulation everything that happens in between would matter. Did you decorate? Is there trash lying around? Is it a long way? Are there many people around? Is that product still there and is he ok with the quality and the price? Well, bummer: You can't set quality and price of that product. He is completely oblivious to his surroundings, he has all the time in world, even though there are a few needs in place, but the only one that might get interesting is hunger, and if you don't have a restaurant, he will buy that randomly chosen product, and drive home again. You can build a labyrinth with a cheese in form of one shelve with tampons and one shelve with men's underwear, and congrats: You have a profitable business as long as there is a working cashier and enough parking space to fill the waiting row. You don't have a reputation, you don't have events, the weather doesn't matter (as far as there is weather), children or even families don't exist, and the range of products fits right in by being extremely limited. The UI is functional at best, and whoever made this does not understand that a huge chunk of the fun in any kind of building and management simulation is watching you handiwork. As "Rimworld" or "Prison Architect" have shown you don't need pristine 3D-graphics for that. But it still requires more than three sounds, one music piece, no animations besides walking and the occasional wobbling of someone who is waiting. There is no interaction between customers and staff, no one is just browsing, and even stealing happens completely random and leads to the customer going home with a red head. And his bag, with the stolen good. It's still a decent time sink for an hours or so, but you'll soon get the sinking feeling that you've seen everything the game has to offer in the first few *minutes*. And to prevent you from refunding this in time, the developers came up with "research". You could also say: A "wait for it, wait for.... yes, it's more of the same"-function. I'm tempted to talk about a good idea and great potential, but this is it: This is the finished game. And it's just not worth it. »