Time to Go Malling with Shop It Up!
Platform: Windows XP/Vista/7
Game Guarantee: Quality tested and virus free. No ads, no adware, no spyware.
Read on... When you have got to take care of sales, irate customers, missing items, sick leaves and restocking inventory, so many things can go wrong - but handling them all can also be fun! Shop It Up takes users behind the scenes of a shopping mall game and lets you experience firsthand the hustle and bustle of commercial retail in this gem of a shop game. Whether you are managing a small candy shop to the trendiest ladies' clothing line, players will get to know the rewarding feel of getting a long line of customers happy in your custom designed stores. With plenty of replay value, addictive gameplay mechanics, and the most impressive use of simplified graphics, Shop It Up game could very well be the management game of the year!
Time to Go Malling with Shop It Up!
Two words: charming and addictive. Game developer Hipsoft recently impressed us all with the Build-a-Lot game series. For those of you who are fans of the city-building game and are wondering how well they transitioned into a virtual mall game setting, there is no need to worry. We consider Shop It Up to be a success of a game, it has great and well detailed graphics (and the best that Hipsoft has shown off so far), excellent music, and a gameplay that makes players want to keep coming back.
Just reading about it does not justify the game; after all, "running a virtual mall" sounds rather boring. When we first booted up the game, the bland loading screen and the sketchy looking main menu made us feel as if we were about to play an incomplete game. But within the first ten minutes of Shop It Up (if your attention span can stand it); we had come to a wonderful realization that this shop game has plenty to offer. Once we got started, the game turned out to be very engrossing. Without even realizing it, more than an hour had passed us by and we were still happily managing several stores at once.
The graphics are well made and the game flows out smoothly. The animations, colors and lighting all combines into a single coherent design structure. The controls are simple: move your mouse and use the left button to interact with everything. The tutorials are quick and easy to follow and the game does not hesitate to send you straight into the heat of things.
The challenge level of Shop It Up is also pretty decent; just enough to keep hardcore players interested, but not so difficult to discourage low tier players. While some general strategies will get you through the game, earning that large cash bonus for finishing tasks fast takes some careful planning and fast reflexes.
The gameplay alone provides Shop It Up with plenty of replay value: a single store can be set up in various ways that will make you want to experiment with various options. The game will take you back to previous portions of the mall you have already completed as part of the career mode challenge (easily doubling the play time), but you can also explore on your own using the casual mode.
While we are obviously impressed, though there are some things we would have liked to see. One of the issues we feel unhappy about is the absolute lack of in-game rankings and trophies that tell you which stages you finished on a high rating (which earns you the largest cash bonus). While the in-game incentives are nice, they do not necessarily affect the overall difficulty and you can hardly feel the reward factor. Challenge completionists will certainly feel the edge missing from the game due to the lack of a stats page.
Now, we do have to point this out early: there is no plot. Players play as themselves - a newly hired mall super-boss with the ability to instantly handle transactions in any store, control hiring of personnel, purchasing of inventory and several other tasks that are never attributed to a single person alone. Your personal assistant and various heads of the mall will contact you in order to notify you of new developments and updated game goals.
And accomplishing said goals is where the real fun starts.
Delivery:
Before we jump into how great the gameplay is, we would have to commend Hipsoft's impressive designs. The graphics are nicely detailed, and the character design combines a style that reminds us of the doctors in the old Theme Hospital games by Bullfrog and Parker Brother's Monopoly Guy (yes, the one with a top hat and a monocle, there's even a caricature of him in-game). While the music initially sounds like that monotonous lounge track that we often hear in the malls, it picks up early on and is actually fun to listen to. Most importantly, the gameplay is solid and addictive. The controls are easy to master, the response to mouse clicks are fast and figuring out the in-game menus and controls takes little effort at all (there is even an easily accessible help button for each submenu).
The mall game is delivered from an overlooking perspective of the stage. From here, you can clearly see all the stores you have placed in that area of the mall, all the workers, inventory displays and massive droves of consumers walking around. It certainly feels a lot more quiet and manageable at the start of each round, but as you progress with upgrading the stores, the volume of people increases, providing players with a feel for rich and busy life of a commercial mall.
Stores, which are a major focal point of the game, are full of many small details that players will love. Each store has a unique set of wall designs very much like those used in ourWorld's make a house game, shop signs as well as front and back displays. When an empty area is converted into a shop, it starts out white and bland. It is up to the player to decide how the store looks like.
Making use of the various design elements will increase the store's rank by a set amount. It will not matter in the game if your book store focuses more on romance novels than westerns. The volume of customers does not change whether the movie shop is specializing in action movies or science fiction. Still, players will want to try out the various design options simply because of how well made they are.
Three of the design elements heavily affect your store design: the wallpaper and the inventory displays. The wallpaper is simply a basic print design, but it can get quite interesting for some stores. The Ski and Surf store can feature a nice set of tropical trees or a landscape mural of nighttime ice capped mountains. The book store has a unique wall design with its shelf mural - which makes the store look like it is filled to the brim with books. Choosing an inventory design allows players to be more specific with their store. If you want your electronic store to focus more on home appliances, then placing the LCD HDTV displays is a good choice. On the other hand, if you want to focus on high end accessories, you can opt to display mobile phones instead. The feel of a toy store can change depending if you choose to have a toy train or a set of dolls on display.
Hipsoft made excellent artwork for the shopping mall game as well. Cartoony and simple, the rounded character designs fit in with the mood of the mall. Character faces are always depicted as bright and smiling, regardless of whether they are providing the player with important information or simple praise about the store. It certainly makes for a very encouraging and rewarding gameplay experience. The dialogues are also fun to read, too bad about the lack of voices in this game as it would have really made those sequences even more interesting.
Figuring out what is going on at your mall in a single glance will not be easy, but put in a couple of hours and your eyes will get used to the sight of a busy mall. At the very least, shop layouts and the stage design have been made with ease of use in mind. The front and back displays are distinctively made to stand out against most of the wallpaper choices -which means that if you cannot figure out the clutter, then it is your fault for not choosing a good combination for the wall paint and stock display options.
The rest of the store designs are set options. The choices for floorings are the same for all stores and it would have been nice to see if like the walls, there are store-specific floor designs available. Also, 'flair' items, which are also required to max out a store's reputation, have a set look. There are rope lights which will line up the border of the store (which makes it look like the edge wall was taken right out of a circus show), a small cardboard sign that will be placed just right beside the cashier area and a couple of large blaring speakers - ironically, there are actually plenty of shoppers that get put off by terribly loud music in stores. For the most part, we'd like to believe that the speakers are not that noisy, the animation just makes it seem that way.
There are the dynamic objects that players need to look out for and fortunately, they have been made easy to spot. Each store is clearly marked with a rank number and an icon that will inform you if it is currently running an advertisement. Customer transactions pop out in large white balloons showing an icon that indicates the type of payment and lastly, stop staff will have their own balloons as well. The user interface for controlling individual store settings are neatly designed pop out menus that give an easy to comprehend list of all options you can select.
We enjoyed listening to the music for Shop It Up, though a little more variety in the tracks would have been nice. Still, the tracks seem to have been composed in a way that it feels both relaxing and comforting to the player. While it may contrast the rather busy feel of the career mode gameplay, it certainly suits the casual mode quite well. The sound effects are few and far in between with the occasional phone rings for mission objectives and accomplishments to the subtle applause and cheers of the crowds whenever a sale or major advertisement is used. We are o the fence as to whether we truly want to hear more. While ambient crowd noise and some sound effects to reflect some ads and flair options would be nice, it could also make the game feel crowded and confusing on an audible level. For now, we feel that the omission of such sounds has been a wise decision.
Gameplay:
It is not often that a game is able to make us lose track of time, and Shop It Up is simply that engrossing. The mall game takes plenty of credit for the way it makes players feel with the progress of the stores as you look forward to making new developments. The challenges are also designed in a way that will get players thinking about their selling strategies and will force you to adapt new gameplay techniques. Because of this, the game is able to break the monotonous feeling that plagues other time management games.
Starting out with your job in the mall, the game lets you try out making your first shop. As one would expect, the initial choices are somewhat limited. There are options to open a store for cookies, a cafe and a candy shop. Each of these stores can be designed with wallpapers, floorings and a signage in order for them to be identifiable. While customers will buy from a completely blank and undersigned store, the mall will only earn a little. Customers will pay much higher for stores with better rank - which rises in value as you add more designs, hire personnel and run advertisements.
Doing all the extra tasks such as adding "flair" to shops, running advertisements, and hiring a cashier is done early, allowing players to focus a little on being able to enjoy seeing the many customers move to and from the stores you have in the mall. The career mode objectives however, will still keep you busy by providing you with constant tasks. By the second stage, players will already have a firm grasp of the overall controls and the kind of gameplay that Shop It Up provides.
The game never stops giving players new things to manage, since there is no way for the game to let you have a mall setup that runs on its own - you will always have something to do. A players level will limit the types of stores, advertisements and personnel available, which in turn, helps control the overall pace of the game.
As you progress into the game, both customers and staff will provide you with new challenges to mind. Customers will start asking gift wrapping options, use checks for payment and in some instances, are too irate for ordinary staff to handle. While a cashier can easily handle cash payments, it takes a store assistant to also handle gift wrapping. Going higher up the ladder opens up more abilities: only a manager can take care of check payments (as well as keep track of your inventory supplies), and the store executive can take care of all payment types, handle angry people and provide players with a discount on advertising. While it may seem like the executive can do the most, the ability of the manager to provide inventory restocking notifications and give them at a significantly lower rate makes the manager the perfect fit for almost all early stages. This is significant because the higher end stores will require expensive displays that the manager bonus far outweighs the set advertisement discount that an executive can give.
It all boils down to strategy; with the executive you have to click less in terms of customers. The manager lets you focus less, checking each store's individual stocks. In both cases, players get free time to look around the mall to spot high-spenders and missing persons.
Speaking of which, locating specific customers in the busy crowds is quite challenging since you have to do it while minding so many stores. A small icon on the lower left will notify you to look for a specific person - being able to spot the individual will award all your stores with an additional +1 to rank, an effect granted by the very grateful customer who is happy you found their missing item.
When you are not busy handling paging requests from the lost and found departments, you can take the time to look for the extravagantly clothed big spenders. These customers, if clicked, will enter the closest store and spend about four times the normal amount a single customer would. Running a TV or radio ad when they are in the store will have them pay even higher. Not only will you get more money from these big spenders, having them visit a store will increase the store's rank by three points.
A good strategy is that when you spot a big spender; turn on one of the context menus for the store. Doing this will keep the customers moving in the background, but the game time will stop - no penalties to the time limit, and no additional notifications to keep track of. When the big spender is in front of your most expensive store, exit the context menu and click the VIP. While it is also possible to use this technique for spotting people specified in the missing items icon, do take into account the fact that the game screen will be darkened and it will still take some skill figure out which customer matches the image.
Your financial gains are mainly reliant on standard customer sales. One way to keep these sales coming is to run advertisements. The discount sale is a great way to make plenty of accumulated transactions but will not earn much (since customers pay only half the price). The newspaper, radio and television ads are the ones you should keep running. The newspaper is great for shops that earn an amount higher than your usual cafe like the book store, hat shop and fabric store. The radio is fitting for the baby store, the gadget shop and other similar shops. For the big stores, such as electronics, antiques and jewelry shops, investing in the TV ad pays off pretty quick.
Learning which advertisements suit which store is a crucial factor for those who want to achieve faster times in achieving goals. While some players will put off running an ad until a store has complete decorations and displays, it is actually a good idea to quickly run an ad (if you can afford it) as a first step. This allows the player to make some quick cash early on. Also, as we mentioned with the big spenders, opening a context menu will keep customers moving in the mall without consuming game time. Since customers will flock to a store with advertisements, it is a good idea to run an ad, open a context menu then wait for customers to fill up the queue to the cashier. Since ads will only run for a specific amount of time, this will allow you to make the most of your investment.
As players enter the later parts of the game, they are constantly introduced to new mall concerns. As mentioned above, customers will start to have varying needs when it comes to making transactions. The staff will also begin having needs of their own as well. Aside from the scheduled salaries that you need to pay off, notifications for sick leaves, vacations and special leaves to attend seminars will also be present. If approved, the staff will be unavailable for a set amount of time and the player will have to manually handle all transactions for the store. While sick leaves and vacations do not provide a bonus, allowing staff to attend a seminar will have the store raise its rank. Not paying the staff or not allowing them to leave will result in the staff member quitting and the store losing a bit of reputation.
Verdict:
It is not often that we find a casual game title that is so well made that we wish there was more to it. Knowing that these titles have size and gameplay restrictions (mostly because of their target market) so much content sure had to have been edited out. Still, it is hard to deny that Shop It Up will have players hooked with its' insanely simply yet addictive gameplay, fanciful art design and unique approach to the world of retail shopping.
We give this shopping mall game a big spending customer's 92/100.