Game Reviews

Shopper's Paradise HD

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Shopper's Paradise HD

Simulations have carved themselves a nice little niche on smartphones, turning us all into entrepreneurs, city architects, and crop-tending country bumpkins.

Mixing cartoon graphics and money management might not sound like the perfect recipe for success, but this blend of casual and cash strikes the right chords when it comes to low maintenance, high-yield gaming on the go.

The problem with a lot of the recent entries in the simulator canon, though, is that they're incessant. Perpetual worlds nag you with notifications and crises, and if you're too busy to tend to your flocks they'll all die in an avoidable digital apocalypse.

Shopping mad

Shopper's Paradise HD does things a little differently. Instead of building your empire over a matter of weeks and months, you build it in a few minutes, reach some goals, and then move on to the next street, indulging in bite-sized blasts of micro-commerce.

The game is split into 25 levels, each with three difficulty settings. These levels are empty streets, laid out in a maze-like formation, devoid of people or buildings, and attached to a railway platform.

You start out with some cash and dreams of pre-recession levels of high street spending. You build your shops, employ some workers, and buy some stock, before waiting for the train-loads to descend with their hard earned wonga.

All the while, other shopping moguls are buying land, building businesses, and basically stealing your cash.

Precinct Assault

Each level has a number of milestones that you have to reach, be it making an amount of money in sales or having a specific amount of cash when your time runs out.

You have between two and four in-game days to complete your task, with each day bringing a set number of trains to your retail village.

You can buy out your competitors or hire better staff, all the while keeping your premises fully stocked and repaired, and making sure your digital consumers leave after spending as much of their money - represented by a green bar hovering over their heads - as is humanly possible.

In a way, Shopper's Paradise HD adds a puzzle mechanic to the shopping sim. You need to work out where the prime spots are in each level, buy out any competitors who've stolen the best pitches, and work your consumers from every angle.

Not quite all consuming

This is all well and good, but Shopper's Paradise HD has a few problems. There's not much depth to it - once you've figured out the mechanics and how to play them to your advantage you're pretty much set.

It's repetitive, too. It might not be a click-to-continue-fest like other sims, but you're still working through the same routine for every level.

If you're looking to sate your commercial lust but you don't have the time or the energy to pour into anything demanding, then Shopper's Paradise HD could well be the game for you.

It's fun, compulsive, and easy to fit around your no doubt hectic life.

Shopper's Paradise HD

A decent addition to the sim genre, Shopper's Paradise HD has a few neat touches and a pace all of its own, but it doesn't quite have the innovative ideas required to make it a must-buy
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.