Another Brick in the Mall review on PC by igamesnews.com

Test: Another Brick in the Mall: take the reins of a huge shopping complex

PC

If you have never dreamed of taking the lead in the construction, management and layout of a huge commercial complex cleverly thought out in order to retain customers and pluck them to the last penny, it may well be that Another Brick in the Mall makes you change your mind. Beneath his not frankly attractive looks hides a rather complete management game.

Small onion complex

It is after several years of early access, the scene of multiple reshuffles and successive balances, that Another Brick in the Mall arrives in final version on our machines. The principle is simple. As mentioned in the preamble, it will be a question of starting from a small starting capital, different according to the mode of difficulty chosen among the three proposed, and transforming your small grocery store into a gigantic shopping complex. You must therefore know how to start small in Another Brick and the whole principle of the game will be based on your search for the balance between affluence, supply, profit and extension

. In summary, the more you will offer different products, the more customers will flock, the more they will flock, the more you will need to provide them with parking spaces, stocked shelves and why not some other amenities (bowling, cinema, fitness center) to keep them in your lap.

As a master of the shopping center, you will have to manage it from start to finish, starting with its construction. The latter will first ask you to lay the foundations of the business (built by full-time workers whom you will recruit) and this newly built area will have to be manually assigned to a function. Once, for example, the area defined as a store, you will have to associate a stock with it. This is also the nerve of the war in a trade that is running at full speed: the shelves must be constantly supplied otherwise the customers will not find what they are looking for and will go elsewhere, them and their carriers. change. It will therefore be necessary to assign a handler responsible for supplying the departments regularly, and ensure that the stock and the delivery area associated with it are not too far away, so that the stock / department path is as short as possible. It is on this principle that the layout of your shopping complex will be dictated and it is one of the charms of the game, since it will be up to you to build a stock per store or on the contrary, do very little and erect your shops all around, each stock can be assigned to different shops. But maybe you will want to build a gigantic block in one piece offering all the products available in the game (and which you will unlock thanks to the work of your research office)? You are free to do so, but this option is too general for a game that allows you to adapt to specific cases.

24/7 profit

The shops can be converted in a very simple way: wooden or hard shelves accommodate food, drinks and hardware products, press, etc., the tables are used for fresh products, the pallets for the household appliances … on each support installed corresponds to its merchandise, which you can install manually to guarantee a real diversity of product in your main store. If the task might seem tedious, Another Brick in the Mall has the good idea of ​​being able to apply the same product on the fly on several shelves and then adjust the offer according to demand. This functionality then makes it possible to multiply the shops and to specialize them.. You will find that, to ensure a good profit margin, it is better not to put all your eggs in one basket.

Thus, having a general grocery store is one thing, but subsequently, opening a butcher's shop, a fishmonger's shop, a bakery can prove to be more profitable since it allows to better distribute the flow of customers and avoid excessive queues at the checkout. . The specialization of the shops is done in stages, and a butcher's shop, for example, will only deserve this designation if more than 50% of its merchandise consists of fresh meat. It's up to you to play with the distribution of products in the different shops to make sure that people will indeed only go to butcher shops to get their meat and why not buy a small bottle of red wine by the way.

The extension of the store is therefore quite natural, but you will quickly understand that it will go deep to erect a pleasant shopping center. Customer satisfaction is essential, but so are your profits. This is also where Another Brick in the Mall is very satisfying, as it offers a rather solid level of micromanagement. You can effectively act on the hourly amplitude of the opening of your shops, and naturally on the planning of your employees. This organization is dictated by consistent peak periods. A single cashier in a grocery store at night will be sufficient while around 12 p.m. and 6 p.m., a full workforce in cash will be required.e. A restaurant will make more money if it is open for lunch and dinner, but this implies hiring several servers, cashiers and cooks to cover the entire opening window. Managing schedules is a real treat, however, aided by a fairly clear interface and at a glance, you can adapt your workforce according to the influx of customers, influx materialized by curves, but also visually , Another Brick in the Mall allowing very clearly to identify the problems with a simple observation directly on the card of a standard day of a shop which does not turn. Significantly reducing the hours of work of a handler who you instruct for example to supply the store only during peak hours will allow you to avoid paying him to do nothing, and this simple adjustment of cursor will make it possible to pass the profit deficit on everything else is well laid out.

Megalomania

In short, in the layout of the structure of the shopping center, the diversity of supply according to demand (which varies according to strong events: Christmas, back to school, etc.) and the balance between affluence and management of the latter, Another Brick in the Mall proves to be very complete and ultimately quite addictive for a good twenty hours or even a little more. Unfortunately, once all the possible elements have been built, the title comes down a little too much to a simple perpetual quest for extension on a huge map, which does not really change the gameplay loop, the expansion simply poses somewhat less interesting product diversity issues. If we welcome the opening to mods, which bring scenarios (which are not very interesting in the basic version), or other shops, we would have liked that the basic game integrates a more complete management of certain buildings of leisure activities that can operate with the bare minimum (a bowling alley, for example, requires only a box and a track to be operational). In addition, we still noted some pathfinding problems which could jeopardize the good performance of your hourly rotation (an employee inexplicably stuck in his car that will have to be dismissed to hire another) and we sometimes railed against an interface not always very intuitive and certainly not very aesthetic, sometimes multiplying a little unnecessarily the clicks to perform a simple action even if fortunately, many filters allow to go more quickly to the desired object or functionality.