Something tells me I’ll be playing this on and off for a while.
Shop Titans is an interesting game, free-to-play on iOS, as well as available on Steam. This review will cover the steam version of the game and I can assure you that it’s identical to the iOS version. The big difference between the two is that there is more real estate to maneuver around when you’re playing on PC, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
Let’s get right into it.
The concept behind Shop Titans is simple on the surface — you are a shopkeeper, you craft items, and you sell items. There’s nothing mind-blowing about this. There are a lot of gamers out there that would be more than happy to keep this sort of structure going for an on-off gaming experience. The concept alone screams ‘mobile game’ for a ‘casual gamer’, which isn’t a knock, but it is the type of gameplay you will run into most of the time. Shop Titans was built for mobile and not built to be a constant form of entertainment for hours on a PC. Again, I can live with that notion and that is not a knock against such a structure. I could picture myself taking a break from reviewing or maybe from another long time-invested game to play something less demanding on my time or mentality. This is what Shop Titans was built for on both iOS and PC.
Nearly the same ‘ol F2P gameplay
For someone older like me, I enjoy repetition and building up a small retail empire, but also leaving it and coming back later. It’s structured, it works for me. The nitty-gritty gameplay of ST starts with crafting. You can make swords, helmets, armor, fancy items, and even make perfected items if you have the right material and money. You then display it, sell it, sometimes haggle with customers, which costs you moral points in a sense (if you overcharge, which you can), and wash-rinse-repeat the gameplay method. Each item you create costs a piece of material that is unique to that item, so when you run out of the material you can either:
A. Wait for that material to cycle slowly back without demanding effort, just patience.
B. Go search for the material by sending adventurers out for you.
C. Purchase material with coins you gain from selling items through other retailers.
As you can tell, the game starts pushing a bit beyond just a ‘crafting and selling’ gameplay structure, but it also maintains that traditional f2p feel.
Starting with ‘A.’, waiting for material to reload is interesting. When you run out of material on a certain item, you can click on the item and see that it has a certain time gauge that has to cycle through before the material is available for free. This is a slow process that was put there to push you towards other methods of material acquisition. For patient people, like myself, I was content on allowing customers to wait, while the material cycled through so I could use them to craft items (yes, you can make customers wait). For others, I can see this as a way for people to make actual money purchases (real money) to gain the material back quickly. This isn’t the first popular game to use a ‘pay-to-play’ model inside of it, and it certainly gives you other outs, which does make it okay. For me, I’m not always up-in-arms about a f2p game that gives you a pay option to continue. It just means either you’re patient or you’re not. Nothing more, nothing less. At the end of the day, developers have to get paid for their efforts, and the amount of detail this game contains definitely warrants pay. Anyway, if you have patience, then you’re going to be just fine, and you can slowly wait for the material to return on a super slow gauge. The gauge has a certain amount of numerical cycles, depending on the complexity of the item. For example, if you’re making a super-fancy sword as opposed to a regular sword, the time gauge might have 12 cycles to go through. It’s a material bar that slowly reloads…12 times before the material is available to make the said item. You can sit and stare at this menu and watch it, which actually does make the process quicker (no, seriously), or you can just let it go and make other items in the meantime. Regardless, as stated above, if you have a customer that wants the item, you can make them wait while the gauge reloads. They won’t walk away.
If you don’t have patience, and you don’t necessarily want to pay money, then you can send adventurers out to do the dirty work for you and gather material. The material drop is a bit random, so you never know what you’re going to get or how much, but the game allows you to hire adventurers, whom you can upgrade, to go seek out creatures and find treasures that contain material you can use to create items. It’s like a tiny RPG module that is attached to a crafting game, which shakes the gameplay up a bit. It certainly gives the game a bit more depth than one would expect from it. I like this portion of the game and each adventurer is timed when they go out for you. The latter means that once they gather material, you have to wait a certain amount of time to use them again. That’s not a terrible thing, as it keeps the structure of the game in check so that you don’t hoard material. It does cater to the f2p gameplay design, though, which by now you understand.
The last way to gather material is by straight up purchasing it with real money. You don’t have to go this route, but it’s the quickest route. I know that people may not like it that developers go this route with their f2p, but, again, they give you other options. You can be patient with the process or you can simply purchase it and explain to yourself, a loved one, or your parents why you did it. Kabam is incredibly transparent about its intentions. A reviewer defending a f2p game that offers up real-world purchases? What in the world???? TRAITOR! I know, right? Say what you want, but you have options, and what way to success you choose to take is your choice.
Back to gameplay, Shop Titans does a good job of allowing you to customize your space, which can be a big deal for a lot of gamers. I found myself enjoying that part of the gameplay thoroughly. You can add racks to your shop to show off your wares, you can customize your space with plants, mailboxes, rugs, and other sorts goodies. You can upgrade furniture, or literally your entire space, and just give yourself some goals to achieve to make the gameplay a bit more engaging. You can move things around and situate it all for the best possible sales, which makes the game somewhat like the Sims in a sense. Having more on display means that you have more customers seeing your wares, which means more money. There’s a lot of nice time-consuming options in Shop Titans that make it more than just a simple retail game. I can dig this particular portion of the game quite a bit. In fact, I seriously enjoyed the organization factor of the gameplay design.
One of the cooler points of the game is how you can join up with a guild that is full of real players. That’s something I found in the iOS game and something that translated perfectly to the PC. This means your efforts benefit your team. The more you sell, the more the guild benefits from your sales. I think this is the strongest portion of the game that sets itself apart from other games of this type. I like that everyone has to contribute and everyone gets bonuses because of their contributions. It gives you player agency in a way to keep doing better to benefit the team. If you don’t like group work, though, then you will hate this part. Just remember, teamwork makes the dream work.
iOS better than the PC version? Seriously?
The biggest ‘oof’ of this game is the controls. While I love the PC real estate, mainly because I have bad eyes, I think the iOS version of the game works better with the controls. Using a mouse and keyboard, and God help me for saying this, isn’t as efficient as using your finger on Shop Titans. I found myself feeling like I was wasting time using the mouse/keyboard. I actually was playing the mobile version and PC version together and I honestly preferred the iOS version because of the controls — and I don’t have a large iPhone 11. I have a tiny version of it. It felt like ‘fewer moves’ with the iOS version and I attended to customers better. It’s a preference, but it matters when it comes to creating and moving items for sale. Is this a dealbreaker for this game? No, but it’s noticeable.
One last point of contention, why isn’t this game on the macOS? While I definitely have both types of machines to play with, a ROG laptop is nice to have around, I would have loved a MacOS version of this game. While I’m not a programmer or a development house, it would seem that the transition from iOS to macOS would be smooth. Granted, you have a fraction of the audience on MacOS, but having a Macintosh option available would have been great. It would have given my Mac purpose, which it desperately needs beyond just editing/graphics/eGPU. This portion of the review isn’t going to make a difference in the score, but it’s a wish.
Overall, I did really enjoy Shop Titans more than I thought I would. It’s more complex than just a casual gaming experience and while it does have a traditional path of Free-to-Play gameplay structure, where real-world pay is involved, there are enough options for you to avoid that if that isn’t your thing. It just requires patience. I’m not crazy about the controls when compared to the iOS version, which is probably my biggest knock on the game.
