G4TV

Another day another Tycoon game. After this many, you’d think the various folks behind the various enterprising games in this unofficial series might just figure out how to get it right. It’s painfully obvious that they can’t…painful just like playing this game for more than 5 minutes at a time. While it’s a mildly interesting idea for a game it’s an abysmal execution that gives a bad name to real-world mall tycoons everywhere.

Let’s Go Shopping

If you’ve never been to the Mall of America, to get a feel for this mid-western shopping Mecca just picture the biggest mall you’ve ever been to, imagine it four-stories tall and box-shaped, and then put a half-assed amusement park in the middle. That’s the Mall of America; just like every other mall, but bigger and with a tiny rollercoaster and one of those log rides in the middle.

Mall of America Tycoon puts you inside of that big square, giving you control of all four sides, plus the theme park, as soon as you’ve proven worthy. Where as in most Tycoon games you start from scratch, here you start with a pre-built mall. It’s built but it’s totally empty. You’re initially given permission to start filling in just one quarter of one floor. As soon as you get that rolling a second section opens up. There are sixteen sections, four per floor and four floors, each needing to be unlocked in turn. Fill up one section, make your customers happy, and it’s on to the next.

How do you make them smile? Well, they’re awfully picky as you might expect, not to mention constantly hungry and thirsty. Manage to get them fed and watered and then they’ll constantly have to go to the bathroom. But, of course, they’re primarily there to shop, and it’s those desires that are hardest to nail down.

Keeping Up With the Shoppers

Clicking on a customer shows a graph of bars. Each bar is a different color representing…whatever that color happens to represent, something you’ll never be able to remember. Blue is clothing for example, while black is books and light orange is music. Intuitive? Not really. Compounding the problem is that you need to click on each customer to see their needs. With hundreds of customers scurrying around at any given time, good luck keeping all that straight.

Thankfully you don’t necessarily need to click on every customer because the game will pop up notices that shoppers in a certain section want books, for example, meaning you have to go build a book store. But, when you get a few sections unlocked and business picks up, it’s impossible to keep up with these messages that scroll by in a flash. As there’s no way to adjust the speed in the game it’s deathly boring as you wait to earn enough money to build stores during the initial part of the game. Later, it’s far too fast.

The biggest problem, though, is that there’s really no feeling of growth here. Unlike most similar games, where the things you are building get bigger inline with the size of your ambitions, here you’re always looking at the same small sections. Sure, you’ll have more sections as you progress, but you’re always dropping the same boring stores into the same boring slots on the floor, repeating again and again until you fill the whole mall. Buying new rides at Camp Snoopy in the middle is the only mild diversion, and they’re not even fun to look at.

Excitement

About the only things exciting to look at in this game are the people who walk about on the roof of the mall. Most shoppers come in through the doors, but a few others proudly break with convention, somehow getting up on the roof and then floating straight into your stores. How do they get from the roof down to the first floor? They just sort of hover through the air and land…jetpacks maybe?

Beyond that bit of intrigue the game is just plain ugly. Things could have been jazzed up a bit if there were any licensed stores, so that instead of building “Burgers” you were building a McDonalds, or a Gap instead of some generic clothing store. As it is, the stores are ugly, the people are ugly, and the little trees and flowers you put up to decorate your mall are ugly. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, the whole game runs poorly, delivering mediocre framerates on solid hardware.

And then there’s the music, which is a perfect simulation of elevator-music-on-Prozac you’d expect to hear when you’re shopping at a place that has a whole store dedicated to the wonder that is Diamonique.

Shop Elsewhere

From the typo-riddled tutorial to the mind-numbing elevator music, there’s nothing good about this game. Even if you’d live at the Mall year-round if you could and have melted more than a few credit cards there in real life, this game will make you hate it and everything it stands for. It’s is a crime against capitalism.

Article by: Tim Stevens
Video produced by: Michael Benson