Where you can be the titan of the shop.
(Disclaimer: I was provided a review key for the purpose of this coverage. It did not include any sort of boost or currency.)
Shop Titans is one of those games that I find hard to review because I have done completely sarcastic reviews before and there is roughly an eighty percent chance that my viewers would assume I’m being sarcastic here without the preface. Shop Titans is one of the best games to get me through my Netflix queue since the invention of auto-play and leaving the room. Yea I’m definitely losing a contact on this one.
It might seem like I’m paying Shop Titans backhanded compliments, but anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I really enjoy games where you play as the shop owner. I’ve put tons of hours into games like Recettear, Cooking Mama on the phone, Restaurant Tycoon, Item Shoppe, etc. I find nearly as much fun being the shop owner as I do being the adventurer and sometimes I want a game that doesn’t require my attention 200% of the time.
So Shop Titans is a game about owning a shop and stocking your shop. It’s a reach, I know. You accomplish this by hiring crafters who make the items you will sell and hiring adventurers to go out and find rare resources. The crafting itself is a game of waiting. It’s not the Michael Bay of video games, it’s more like the lazy river.
One thing I like about Shop Titans is that the game feels as you are running numerous slow-speed marathon races at the same time, but every action is forwarding some goal and nothing feels like it’s wasting time. Crafting items doesn’t just serve to build your profit margins; as you duplicate an item over and over it builds your crafter’s level and speeds their work, opens up new item blueprints, and increases that item’s quality bringing in more profit.
Your shop is also decorated based on what you have in stock, which is a nice touch.
There is progress everywhere with a constant parade of upgrading furniture, crafting items, leveling your heroes, leveling your crafters, adding on to the shop, selling goods, buying goods, haggling prices, and just making things look fancy. Like I said, it’s a game that doesn’t require your full attention. You can go make a sandwich, have it on while watching television or playing a game, and check in every few minutes to sell some items and do some stuff.
Unless you’re a really hardcore grinder trying to maximize efficiency to the T, you are not going to play Shop Titans with a laser-focused attention. It isn’t that kind of game, I’m sure developer Kabam wouldn’t try to claim otherwise.
Shop Titans also has an energy bar and WAIT WAIT IT’S NOT THAT KIND OF BAR. The energy bar is basically your haggling bar. Let’s say you have 80 energy total and a customer comes in wanting to buy a sturdy cane for 200 gold. You can sell it to him and gain 4 energy. At the cost of 25 energy you can surcharge him and get extra gold, or give him a discount and gain 10 energy to use on surcharging a more expensive item. For -5 energy you can suggest an alternative if you don’t have sturdy canes in stock, and you can also small talk which may or may not succeed and get you some energy.
It isn’t an energy bar like you’d see in other free to play games. Your limits to crafting are how quickly your base resources replenish and I never had a problem with those.
Now let’s talk about Shop Titans’ cash shop and I will remind my readers that I don’t pull any punches when it comes to this stuff. I once roasted a developer so badly that it became a horror story at GDC China. I am not against convenience microtransactions when they are in free to play games, but I am going to point out right off the bat that Shop Titans does nudge you from time to time to say “hey we need to feed our families too.” Not enough to get annoying in my book, but I know for a few this is going to be an issue if I didn’t bring it up.
The convenience stuff in Shop Titans doesn’t bother me because I never feel the urge to rush anything. Like I said, it’s a lazy river. Enjoy the ride. Yes I can speed up upgrading my storage bin for the equivalent of a quarter instead of waiting three hours, but I’m not doing anything that I would absolutely need that upgrade in that time span. Even letting my resource bins upgrade naturally I never hit a point where I have to stop playing because there is nothing available.
There are also guilds in the game which are quite handy. Your guilds can pool their money together to level up investment in different crafters which has benefits like raising their maximum level and speeding up resource gathering. You can also help your guildmates and request help for various projects.
The only aspect of the game that is shamelessly money-driven is that you can spend a crapload of real money to buy decorations to raise your prestige. What does prestige do? Nothing, outside of rank you up on the prestige leaderboards. It has no gameplay effects, who the hell cares. I haven’t seen anything that I definitely needed from the cash shop.
Alright I might have to spend the $2 to buy this taco couch. It is a limited time for Cinco de Mayo.
(Editor’s note: Connor bought the taco couch roughly thirty seconds after taking this screenshot. He also bought a taco pillow with in-game currency. See below.)
TACO PILLOW!
Ultimately Shop Titans is a free to play game that doesn’t punish you for playing without paying and also doesn’t take the fun away if you throw in a couple of bucks (and I mean literally a couple of bucks). As far as developers go, Kabam seems to be more on the ethical side of microtransactions when it comes to free to play games. There is a lot to do here and plenty of time to do it.
I give Shop Titans two thumbs up and a recommendation that it works best when paired with a podcast or catching up on your TV queue and not being the sole focus for a couple hours at a time.
Shop Titans is available today on Steam. Check it out.
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