20 May, 2020

Shop Titans Review

Before the review, the monetisation in detail:
Premium currency (Can be used to skip timers, buy cosmetics, pay for anything, or get upgrades before you are high enough level)
Monthly subscription
Lootboxes
Exclusive timed offers
Paywalls(Some that can not be bypassed through ingame means)
And a slot machine that can pay out some premium stuff if you're very lucky(But probably won't)
There is a lot of the above, and it constantly reminds you of it all on practically every screen

The game itself is very simple, consisting mainly of timers that you wait for as you craft things to sell. They start small at under a minute and then get longer. You can send out heroes to go gather resources for you using gear you give them, which is a simple timer after which they fight the monster. Combat is entirely automated, so you can not affect it after giving the order to go on the quest. Half of the game's main loop is about letting the timers run down and then collecting your crafts/loot.

The other half is selling your stuff, which is equally simplistic. Customers enter your store, look around, and then try to buy an item if it matches their class. There is no real reason why they would want the item outside of it being of their class, and they will happily downgrade to newbie gear if that's what you're selling. You can spend energy to raise the price, and they will never say no. Prices are fixed with that one exception, so you can not control how much money you get for something.
The main gameplay loop is similar to idle games, with the exception being that you need to poke it occasionally to keep the timers going. Numbers go up but nothing really changes for your shop.

Even then there are two things the game almost does right- The guild system encourages communicating with other players in your guild and helping eachother. You invest part of your money into the town which helps everyone in the guild. You get to be together doing...Not much, since the main gameplay is still waiting, but it is a good way to encourage people to help eachother. Except it's a very limited number of people, since your guild size is limited by the size of the town hall, and you will need to invest millions in gold each to get the guild size up to a level where you can afford to have some more casual players. They make a great system for cooperation, and then limit you from being able to bring in people to cooperate with.

The second is cosmetic, letting you customise your shop interior. Place/move furniture, wallpaper, and flooring. There's a few neat things someone can do with this, and with some time and effort you can make your shop look really nice.
But it's also incredibly limited with 2/3rd of the cosmetics and skins being premium currency only or very expensive, leaving you with very little choice

All things considered, I struggle to think of people who I would recommend this game to. Although the guild system is interesting in how it encourages you to work with others, the rest of the game is decidedly uninspiring and simple. It is about waiting for the timers to run down at its core, and it does not even offer you any real reward for doing it or more than token interaction.
You can pay to get your timers down faster or to skip some of them, but there is no point to it all except to watch your number get bigger. The number does nothing, and in the end everything feels like that is exactly what you achieved- Nothing

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