They say it's all about who you know, but sometimes finding the right job is all about who you pull out from in front of a moving vehicle. In Maulidan Productions' sim game Multishop Tycoon, someone else's near death experience is your lucky break, and you've got the chance to start clawing your way up the corporate ladder by managing and building different stores and resources in different areas around the town map. The handy in-game tutorial will explain the finer points, but most of it is fairly intuitive. You're aiming to build facilities and manage their stock (from the items available to the prices thereof), while making a tidy profit and ensuring your expenses for things like employee salaries don't get out of hand. Learning the value of your stock and where you're selling it is important since, as the tutorial points out, Hidden Valley Ranch commercials lie to us, and kids probably won't be flocking to a broccoli cart on a playground. The game is divided up into days and months, and you can unlock various objectives to complete, as well as some sweet upgrades at the home office to make things even more efficient, buy advertising, gain new items and areas, and so forth.
As far as tycoon games go, Multishop Tycoon is sort of right between simple and just complex enough. Being able to manage the cost and types of each item in a location is a nice touch, especially once more items and locations become available, but at the same time, it feels like the game could have offered you more feedback in the way of, say, the RollerCoaster Tycoon games. There's no real way to tell why someone might walk by your stand without ponying up any dough, and adding in, say, little thought bubbles that would tell you if your items were too expensive, or if someone had a hankerin' for bananas when you're just shilling iced tea. You'll find yourself spending a lot of time grinding for cash even when you find that "sweet spot" with your inventory, so despite its charm and simple pick-up-and-go gameplay, it might move a bit slowly for some. But hey, you've got to walk before you can run, and you've got to convince a bunch of schoolkids that they want your overpriced watermelon before you can get a high interest bank loan. Or... something. Multishop Tycoon is a colourful, casual simulation game with just enough of a chunk of strategy under its hood to make it the sort of thing coffee breaks were made for. Besides, it sure does bring back memories. Why, I remember my first carrot and iced tea stand in the park like it was yesterday...
Took away a star on this game because of the night period when you can't really do anything and with the pause before the start, there's no reason to have a "dead air" section of time.
Hi Princess Sparkle,
You can just press the "start day" button again and it'll skip right through the "dead air" of the night. :)
Help having problems with explore town achievement
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