We don’t need your eggs and bacon! We don’t need a ceramic bowl! All in all you’re just Another Brick in the Mall.
I’m quite partial to management games. There’s something strangely satisfying about taking a small amount of pretend money, applying it correctly and watching your financial machine work away. Unless I’m playing Monopoly that is. To hell with that game. Anyway, Another Brick in the Mall (which is a shoe-in for my favourite game title this year) is a management game in this vein which, even at this early stage, has great potential. You’ll start with a large amount of land, a small amount of cash and a handful of construction workers with a mission to “fill this wild land with concrete and capitalism!”
The game starts with a tutorial that runs you through the game’s core mechanics at a good rate, teaching you to create buildings, splitting them into store and stock room, constructing sufficient parking and hiring staff. You’ll have a small income pretty quickly before the game sets you loose. Whilst the tutorial certainly doesn’t explain everything, it does a good job of getting you up to speed on the basics, and the tooltips are detailed enough for you to figure out the rest. There are a number of mechanics that aren’t explained at all though, and don’t seem to do much (that I could work out anyway). I can understand why customers have a patience statistic, but what about your staff? Does it do anything? Not that I could tell. This is still in its early stages though, and there may be plans for this in the future.
To keep you from just throwing down everything as soon as the game starts, there’s a system of time based research to gradually unlock new features and store types. I personally found it quite amusing that I could open a shopping mall without first understanding the need to have toilets for customers, but then I don’t run a shopping mall in real life. Anyway, the research system makes a lot of sense and allows you to unlock features that you want to work on. At this stage in the game’s development though, there doesn’t seem to be all that much to unlock, and each one unlocks fairly quickly. After about 8 hours gameplay I had everything ready to go and nothing more to do with my research tree. Hopefully as the game moves forwards more features will be added to this, or perhaps other criteria for researching other than waiting a set length of game time.
This brings me to my issue with a lot of management games of this style. Once you have everything under control, and you’ve built all you had intended, then what? What next? This game currently suffers the same problem. Once I had everything built there wasn’t much more to do than continue building, earning money, then building some more to gradually rake in more money. It needs something more, such as disasters like Sim City (which this game takes a certain amount of inspiration from). Could there be security alerts, shop lifters or vandalism? Perhaps power cuts or mass staff illnesses. Maybe other competing malls opening in the same plot of land to add an element of competition? Again, this is in Early Access right now, and is in a damn good state considering it’s in pretty much its earliest playable phase, but I hope there are plans to add more features for the end game. The version of the game I played included a save showing what you can build given enough time: an absolutely enormous shopping mall. I’d be inclined to do this with more stuff to fill it with.
In spite of the late game lacking features at the moment, it’s still incredibly mesmerising. It’s very satisfying to get a store running just right to the point you can almost let it run itself. The stock is kept full, the queues aren’t too long and its bringing in a profit. You can micromanage a store right down to what stock is on what shelf to meet the customer demands, adjust staff working hours and salaries, and manage the amount of reserve stock. If you like micromanagement, there’s a lot to enjoy here once you’ve built up a medium shopping centre. Each store has its own set of statistics, allowing you to work out which shops are doing well.
The graphics are simplistic, but look nice and suit the game rather well. I suspect there may be a little inspiration in terms of visuals from Prison Architect based on the look of the characters and how they move around the world. The way the shadows move around the trees and buildings as time progresses is subtle, but a nice touch. Frustrated customers gradually getting a redder face is a nice visual cue that there’s a problem in your store. You may not be able to fix it immediately, but being able to keep an eye on the store and figure out how to resolve the issue is an option. You can also select and follow any member of staff or the public (similar to Roller-coaster Tycoon) should you wish to. I haven’t found a use for it, but it’s there if you feel it would be useful.
Early Access has a bit of a bad reputation these days, often filled with sloppy games or ones with big ambitions that are never achieved (I’m looking at you Towns!) in spite of the developer’s promises. Another Brick in the Mall feels more complete than a lot of games that claim to be finished on Steam. There’s easily a good 10 hours of enjoyment here, and the game is only in version 0.1.4 at the time of writing. With time this could easily turn into the management game I’ve been missing for a long time. Keep an eye on this one. There could be a lot in…store!
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