What Are We Reviewing?
Today I bring you a review of the PC game Mall Empire. Now... the first thing I want to say is that by no means am I PURPOSELY looking for awful games to review. I'm just looking to pay some games and give my thoughts on them. Honestly I really want to like games I play and do give them the best chance possible to show me everything they have. I really REALLY tried to give Mall Empire a chance, but it just... isn't... good.
This game was released February 16th, 2017 on Steam. It is currently not in early access, and I'm sure that I must have gotten this game on sale, because there's no way this is worth $4.49 CAD. As you can see by the art-style, Mall Empire is not a premium game, it's definitely a casual / indie designed game from a small team.
Gameplay:
The goal of Mall Empire is to design a mall in which many customer want to visit and spend their money, allowing the player to make money, buy more things, make a bigger mall, and make more money.
The first thing you'll need to start your "empire" is to spend hearts to unlock shops. Hearts are earned by having an open mall and having customers visit the mall. Every once in a while you get a heart just by having customers coming and going throughout the day.
After you've unlocked shops by spending hearts, you have to spend money to build those shops in your mall. Each shop has a different starting amount of stock and makes a different amount of money for their product. As each shop sells product, it gains experience and eventually levels up which allows the player to put points into either more stock which allows you to sell more during each day, or more quality which allows each stock item to sell for more money.
There is a day/night cycle in this game which really doesn't serve too much of a purpose other than to reset the stock levels of the shops and give a break in the customers coming to the mall.
Other things the player is able to do with their money includes investing in advertising (which brings more customers to the mall), residential (which brings more customers to the mall), or Office (Which can affect some maintenance costs... or bring more customers to the mall).
If you reach some set requirements such as making so much money or having so many customer visit, the player can then level up their mall to gain access to more shops, more investments and more combinations of shops to make more money with when arranged in set patterns.
Graphics:
The graphics of this game are, well... it's a functioning game. Graphics aren't the most important thing on my list of stuff to care about when playing a game, though it is nice to have something pretty too look at from time to time. Considering the price tag of this game, I wasn't expecting much and I was probably able to get Mall Empire on sale for somewhere between $1-$2 if memory serves me right. So I didn't take the design of the graphics too harshly when deciding how I felt about the game.
Now I did find that there are quite a few spelling errors and issues with translation. English was not the first language of the design of Mall Empire and that's okay. In fact, even though there were many spelling errors and issues with translation, I still had a little bit of fun with it right up until the end.
Sound:
For the game sounds there isn't much to talk about. It's not that the game sounds aren't great... there just aren't any. Not even basic sounds for building or clicking on buttons or collecting income. Nothing.
Though there aren't any game sounds, the designers were at least nice enough to put in some music. The music is actually quite nice to listen to and in my opinion doesn't get annoying at all. The issue I have with the music is that it doesn't really seem to fit the gameplay. The way I would describe the music is some sort of endless arcade kind of thing... but more like something I would expect from an endless arcade shooter or a bullet hell, not a management game.
Replayability:
I really don't think Mall Empire is very replayable at all. I mean, I played it one time and quickly found that the gameplay formula got very old VERY quickly. Maybe it's just because I'm a strategy gamer, but I didn't find purchasing shops, building shops, and annoyingly clicking on each shop and then another following button just to collect income to be a very fun thing to do without any change other than what is available to construct for little pixel guys to walk past.
Even with that in mind, I still managed to keep myself playing all because the music was enjoyable enough to give it ago... right up until this:
Now you may wonder... what? If you look at the top-most construction in each picture, you'll see what I'm talking about. I was pretty alright with Mall Empire until I ran into this issue where I couldn't build an elevator on that second-level space. No matter how hard I tried, I could build anything BUT an elevator.
Well sure (you might say), why not just build it somewhere else? Simple: I don't want to; that wasn't part of my design. I didn't PLAN to not be able to build something because of a glitch in the system. Most times glitches exist in games I don't care; they're usually rather funny, but when a glitch seriously demolishes the entire point to the same so badly that what is supposed to be done CANNOT be done... it's a problem.
SUMMARY:
Though I was able to endure the many issues in the game from translation to lack of sounds, the gameplay just was not engaging enough at all. I could have put up with it all if not for the terrible glitches which make the game unplayable in the way it was meant to be played.
It's at that point that I realize the gameplay itself is just terrible. If it was at least playable, it wouldn't be on the bottom of the lists. Unfortunately I cannot even recommend this game while it is on sale. I'm giving Mall Empire 1/10 because of all of this.
As a sidenote: this really seems like a game for people who are obsessed with getting achievements. Because this game was so terrible, I didn't spend much time playing it... and still somehow managed to get 122/400 achievements.
~ DaemonVirus
