Simulator games are among the most common types of genres you can find on Steam these days. There seem to be thousands of them released every other Sunday, which can make finding good, entertaining simulator titles to play a challenging process despite their white-hot popularity.
In my experience, the best of the management type sims tend to force the player to budget their time to maximize revenue in one form or another be it money, crops, gems, or something else. This can create all sorts of hectic challenges within the simulation, like when you realize you’ve been putting items on store shelves without actually setting their prices. All of that can make sims fun and entertaining.
The sim I’m reviewing today, Mall Manager Simulator, is able to hit a lot of great peaks in terms of gameplay, but there are some pretty deep valleys to accompany that, so be warned.
Plot Ahoy!
There honestly isn’t any plot here, as this is a simulator of the type that throws you right into operating a downtown mall. Why you are there or how you got there does not really matter as you are tossed right into it. Managing your stores at the mall largely involves making sure you’re ordering enough shelves and displays to show items to perspective buyers. You also will be ordering products like cell phones, headphones, guitars, and other things depending on which stores you decide to open in your capitalist paradise. Finally, you also have to set prices and try to maximize profits depending on what people are buying. As a fun little bonus activity, you also get to ride a segway in full mall cop style to try and catch thieves trying to abscond with your valuable merchandise.
In the beginning, you’ll be doing a lot of your stocking manually and checking out customers yourself, but it doesn’t take very long to level up enough to be able to hire a cashier, security guard, and more people to handle some of the simpler tasks for you. That is a good thing because you’ll be spending almost all of your time ordering merchandise and sticking it on shelves or in storage, which can be pretty hectic even when things are working as they should, or much more difficult in a crisis.
Review Notes
Aside from your general duties of restocking shelves, ordering products, and checking out customers, you also have to keep your mall clean and free of clowns who lower potential sales. In order to get rid of them, you need to pick up a money gun from a register and shoot dollar bills at them until they leave. It may seem strange to shoot clowns with a money gun to make them go away, but that’s because the developer changed the homeless people into clowns. Maybe the developer received feedback that this mechanic was dehumanizing in a pretty terrible way, so they decided to make an adjustment, but as it stands right now, shooting clowns with money to make them leave is a non sequitur, logically.
The largest overall concern I have with recommending Mall Manager Simulator is, quite simply, its complete lack of polish. You can hire cashiers, but sometimes they completely break and are incapable of checking out customers for some reason, effectively negating why you’d ever hire them. Which, of course, you have to hire them because you can’t simultaneously manage the register at three to four stores on your own. There will be times when customer lines get extremely long and you need to do something about it yourself, otherwise no one gets checked out for the rest of the in-game day, costing you valuable revenue.
As mentioned previously with cashiers, customer AI will completely break at random points in time too. It’s pretty easy to tell when it occurs because you’ll have a customer or two standing in the middle of the checkout line completely unmoving. Other customers can sometimes walk through the broken ones which will oftentimes fix the broken patron, but people walking through closed doors and walls also just seems to be a thing that happens in this game, so I’m not entirely sure that customers phasing through one another is a bug or a feature.
Mall Manager Simulator is also extremely loud. Like, ear bleed levels of loud, and the in-game options menu to adjust the generic music volume doesn’t even work. Turning down the master or music volume will do absolutely nothing to stop the assault on your ears, so you have to adjust this game’s volume from the general Windows mixer settings manually. I’ve never encountered a title before that fully released with one of its options menu tabs being completely ineffective. Sound effects settings seem to be adjustable, so you can hear your incredibly loud footsteps and the anti-theft sirens, but absolutely nothing makes the music less annoyingly loud.
On the bright side, Mall Manager Simulator seems to capture the barest elements of what makes other store management simulator titles attractive, such as hurriedly stocking shelves and checking out customers while the in-game hours tick away. That’s a fun core gameplay loop, and it’s worked fantastically for popular simulators like Gas Station Simulator (which we reviewed a few years ago), Supermarket Simulator, Potion Tycoon, TCG Card Shop Simulator, or other top-quality titles in this genre. Unfortunately, a lot of what made those aforementioned titles successful is missing from this one.
For example, customers will constantly complain about the prices of products (in broken English or outright nonsensical phrases no less) even if you’re selling the items at-cost. Even when selling an item at no profit, someone will yell, “It is in gold price!” before storming out of your store. Other problems include floor cleaners that won’t clean, security guards that won’t stop thieves a good portion of the time, and many other really basic problems that really should have been fixed long before this title was released for play. A lot of the things that makes these kinds of games entertaining is that when you spend money to do something, you can expect those things to work. I watched as a thief slowly walked out of my electronics store with a cellphone he didn’t pay for while the air raid sirens that are the anti-theft alarms were going off, and the security guard continued moving in the opposite direction. It seems like security doesn’t try to catch thieves at all unless they happen to encounter them along their predetermined route of moving back and forth along the entire length of the mall, with no attempt made to adjust it whatsoever. Or perhaps this was another bug, I have no idea.
You earn card packs by doing various tasks in the game, which it’s such a random feature inclusion but at least it gives you a nice little bonus for accomplishing various store tasks yourself. Though, there are some further improvements I would like to see on the management side of things because some mechanics as they exist right now are a little more barebones than they should be. For example, when you order product you need to manually move the boxes to storage by yourself, as there’s no automatic method to do that, but you can only carry a single box at a time. Stocking your warehouse winds up taking a significant amount of your days because of this, and the automatic restocking function doesn’t work unless the product is in the store’s warehouse. It would be nice to either carry more than one box at a time, or be able to order merchandise and have it delivered directly into storage, rather than unceremoniously teleporting onto the floor of the store you ordered the items for.
TLDR
Everything in a store management sim that a player would like is present in Mall Manager Simulator, but right now there are simply too many bugs and a lack of polish to make it worth the investment over something like Supermarket Simulator or TCG Card Shop Simulator. There are some things that should take less time like stocking your storage with merchandise, plus too many copious bugs and also obvious AI art used for the advertising spaces in the title.
Of course, many of these aspects could be improved upon later on with updates, especially since there is a great core gameplay loop of rapidly checking and ordering merchandise and getting it on shelves while customers meander their way into your stores. When the gameplay loop works, it works really well. As of right now, there are only five stores that you can open in Mall Manager Simulator, and while making sure that the respective warehouses for each store is sufficiently stocked with product reaches those levels of hectic normally associated with the best management sims, too many other things either consume too much time or simply don’t work right at the moment for Mall Manager Simulator to be more enjoyable than its contemporaries.