If you've been reading my reviews, you've probably noticed that I play a decent variety of mobile games, and that I'm not exactly apologetic with what I play. This is one of those games I'm not afraid to be judged about for playing, especially since I hopped on this boat early, becoming one of its early access players. While this isn't the first shop simulator game out there, nor is it the most original, I knew it would be one of those games that would stick with me.
Overview
Quick, what's the first thing that pops into your head when you see the name Shop Titans? Unlike Duels, it's exactly the kind of game you think it is. If management games aren't your thing, feel free to stop reading here and check out Identity V or PUBG instead.
Shop Titans puts you in the role of a nameless shopkeeper who has just moved in to a village to start a business. You customize your shop and manage time, resources, and manpower to progress and sell, sell, sell! Along the way you'll join other players in a collective effort to improve the town you all live in as a guild.
Gameplay
There is honestly not much in the way of gameplay in the traditional sense. You don't move characters in real time, nor do you plan out strategic attacks. Your main actions involve deciding whether to sell an item or not.
In this game, non-player characters come into your shop and ask to buy things from your inventory. It doesn't sound too interesting, but you do have options with how to go about your operations. You can raise or lower the selling price, sell at base value, suggest a different item, small talk, or outright turn the customer away. All of these options do different things with your energy.
Energy is the limited resource you get by selling at base price and below, making small talk, or by customers admiring your shop decor. Raising the price of an item or suggesting an item costs a chunk of your energy reserves. Inversely, if you give a discount, you gain a larger chunk of energy than selling at base price. Small talk is a chance of gaining or losing energy. It can backfire, which costs you energy with no gain.
To get items, you need to assign build orders into a limited queue. You also need to have specific artisans for different items. The blacksmith can't build you a bow, for example, but he can make you swords. The artisans gain experience for each item they produce, and leveling them up results in percentage reduction in their build times. These crafted items do vary in time and resource requirements, so there is a bit of planning involved when one of the story heroes comes in for a special request. If you collect enough of their hero coins from completing their requests, they level up. These heroes have storylines that you can follow for some gems, and their stats and abilities grow if you decide to get enough of their coins.
Why are there heroes in a shop management game? Experienced players can probably guess that you can ask these heroes to go on quests with other generic heroes that you can customise. The generic heroes stay in your roster until you fire them, and the quests yield keys, chests, equipment that you can sell, and more importantly, materials that you cannot produce from the city.
Materials produced by the city are gained simply by waiting for you storage bins to fill up. You buy the storage bins as furniture and you can increase your maximum capacity for your resources by upgrading them. Upgrading them past a certain point will result in them taking more space, so there is some planning involved.
Your wait time for resources is made shorter by upgrading the buildings in the city that relate to the resource you want to replenish at a faster rate. You don't need to upgrade the lumber mill if you want more iron. Upgrading other buildings yield varying results, such as allowing more players into your guild, increasing level caps, and decreasing rest times for heroes after they go questing, to name a few.
All upgrades either require gems, which is the currency you pay for in the game, or the gold you get from your sales. Raising your maximum capacity of any material, raising the number of heroes you can hire, expanding your shop floor, decorating your shop, upgrading buildings, and other actions all cost gold or gems. Gold is the preferred option as you can get gold easily if your stock is good enough. Gems is the game's equivalent of real-world money.
Art Style and Aesthetics
The way the game looks is the nail on the coffin that houses my time-spending. The game is completely rendered in 3D, which leaves room for a lot of creativity and detail in the character and visual design. There is a lot of detail in the visuals of the game, from the crafted items, to the day-night cycle, to the environment design.
What is really captivating though, is how you can customise your shop and shopkeeper. Character creation is actually fairly detailed for what the game is, and you have quite a few aesthetic choices available. However, the result of your aesthetic decisions will usually match the thematic appearance of the other characters of the game.
Changing up your shop not just includes buying furniture and expanding your floorspace, some of the furniture also have skins. You can buy them for gold or gems to coordinate with your walls and floors. The walls and floors can also be changed for the same currency, and are unlocked for unlimited use after a one-time purchase.
Sound
The sound effect aren't really that vital to this game, but they're there. In terms of music, there only seems to be one track for your shop and for the city, but there are individual tracks for each dungeon that you can send heroes to. Each storyline hero also has their own short theme song that plays when you talk to them in your shop. This is cool at first, but gets a bit annoying after playing the game for a while.
Time Gates
While there is no pay wall, and the game is inherently one big time gate by nature. The times to complete upgrades, finish quests, and produce items all start out quite quickly, and you can accomplish a lot in the early stages of the game. A lot of the paid content is provide alternative ways to play the game and some extra content, but are in no way vital to your progress in the game.
However, as your items become more complicated, the build times go up to hours for one item, which require a resource obtained in a dungeon that takes over an hour to finish. You will eventually require higher capacities of the city-generated materials, which take more time to upgrade your resource bins for. This exponential increase in time requirements drop not only its replay value, but also its reward-effort balance. The low effort with moderate reward makes the game difficult to enjoy in the later stages of the shop.
Final Thoughts
Objectively, the game sits somewhere around 3.8 stars out of 5. While I really got hooked on Shop Titans for a solid length of time, the game really is a game of waiting. Management is great if there is a result after a reasonable amount of time. The timing produces a lack of interest in the later stages of the game, and as a result higher level players often disappear.
What I will say though, is that the game is beautifully presented. Shop Titans is probably the most streamlined and most aesthetically pleasing shop management simulator out there, although the sounds might as well be nonexistent.
Thanks for reading!
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