Mall Management Fun! Another Brick in the Mall is not just a cute riff on a classic Pink Floyd lyric, it's an accurate description of the game. Not only do you build a mall, you run the entire show, managing all the mall's employees and stores. The game is almost completely sandbox, with a couple scenarios supplied as well as others available in Steam Workshop. Or craft your own from various settings and game modes. In the default scenario, you are given a small maitenance center and a few builders to start, plus a little parking lot for them. First, you'll need to set some buildings and lay out some roads for your customers and staff to travel on. This is done through a fairly intuitive click-drag to draw lines and rectangles. There are also tools to command your builders to remove roads, buildings, and objects. One annoyance here is that the blueprints for pending orders are very light and can easily blend into the objects. Once your builders have laid foundations and placed walls and doors, you can start to designate zones to tell the game what establishment you are building. You can draw lines and blocks of shelves and checkout counters and other placed objects, easing the tedium of placing stuff. After shelving units and tables and other places to display goods are placed, you'll need to designate what items are sold where. This can be accomplished by painting a designation over a block of shelves. Stores need goods in storage for the shelves to be stocked. Stores need a linked storage zone nearby. Multiple stores can share a storage area, making it easier to set up stores in tight places. You can't set prices. Item shelves come with a set range of prices and profit margins. However, you can gain various price points of some goods. Goods sold come in three tiers of price points, but the higher tiers only come if certain requirements are met. Default is tier one. If a store specializes in a certain broad category, such as groceries or hardware, then some items become tier 2 and pricier. If a store is essentially a boutique store, such as for cosmetics or phones or comic books, then the items within become the premium tier 3. Not all items can be elevated this way. Deliveries come not in large semis and huge orders, but in vans and a few crates per van. The storage zone is not an inventory room with large shelving units, but a place to plop down generic crates. These crates fill the zone with a simple typewriter-style algorithm, and your stock clerks ALWAYS pull from the last crate in line, making restocking a bit inefficient at times. You'll then have to hire staff. Most establishments require stock clerks, and all require cashiers. You'll also have restaurants that might need waiters. Applicants have experience ratings for all the possible jobs you can hire. Applicants have ages, and experience does tend to rise with age. Applicants also have ratings in personal traits of speed, patience, and sociability. Speed's relevance is obvious in jobs that require employees to travel large distances. It's less clear how patience and sociability apply. Once at work, your employees also get satisfaction, hunger, and nausea ratings, with the latter being a stand-in for toilet needs. The game defaults to automatically giving raises to employees based on satisfaction and hours worked. In a great QoL feature, you can easily alter staff shifts by sliding their shift time, and you can shrink or expand that shift. You can overlap shifts, too. Each time you return to this screen for a store, staff are then re-sorted by shift start time and color-coded by job. When stores open and customers arrive, they are generated with the same code as your employees, even getting experience ratings in jobs. Satisfaction now applies to their shopping experience. Patience applies to how long they will wait in lines. Customers will eventually want restaurants and public restrooms, regardless of game mode, but Normal mode ignores food and toilet needs of staff. Nausea is a reaction to filth, or squalor, as the game calls it. It's not just trash from fast food restaurants. Items sold have expiration dates. Expired items become trash. If trash lingers for too long, they attract rats. Stinky trash and rats sicken and repel customers. You will have to hire janitors, based in the maintenance centers with your builders, to collect the trash and take them to designated garbage pickup roadwork zones. Your builders, meanwhile, double as exterminators and remove the rats. Theft, in the form of shoplifting, also happens. Employ security guards and set them on patrol to catch thieves. Items are equipped with anti-theft tags by default. Detectors set at exits will alert guards and send them on chase. The game calendar works on the standard seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall. Each season lasts ten game days. The calendar includes some of the yearly shopping events, such as back to school, Halloween, and Christmas. Each event causes demand for appropriate categories. Sometimes random events happen, such as movie releases or book and video game releases, which cause a sudden surge in demand. The game was released just as COVID lockdowns were starting, and one event is a virus outbreak which causes several people, both staff and customers, to wear masks. Some staff stay home sick, and customers suddenly want to stock up on drugs and non perishable supplies. Events are flagged for you a season in advance, allowing you time to prepare. The game takes a rare pro-union stance. Two random events are one-day strikes by garbage collectors and delivery services. Your own employees will also eventually unionize. They will never strike, but they will vote on a raise on the minimum wage every couple of game years. Strangely, while you are given several warnings of an upcoming vote and a chance to bribe/lobby union leaders to call off the vote, you are never told how the vote went. There's some nice info about the progress of your mall, mostly in the form of graphs. Some graphs appear as tooltips on zones and on the relevant info bar item. At the bottom, various game alerts pop up and linger until dismissed. These include alerts for frustrated customers leaving for various reasons, the increase of squalor, as well as customer hints as for which specialty stores they want that you don't have yet. Much love went into the art for this game. People get these large expressive potato heads that help display their satisfaction or patience, with angry customers turning red and agitated. Or you can grab the official mod that turns peeps into neutral pawns. Either way, you can zoom out and watch everyone scurry about like ants on the fastest speed. Zoom into the shelves, though, and you find some subtle shoutouts to various North American faves. And you can watch the shadows move through the day outside. I tend to turn off the music and sound to games I multitask with, like this game. But there's a few nice instrumental tracks, as well as some great ambiance if you zoom in close enough with traffic and checkout sounds. The game is solid, but pretty much abandoned. Rather than issue further updates, the devs or someone connected to the game merely uploaded some official mods. And there are scores of items and categories that could have been in the game. Toys skew neutral (games) to male (action figures, construction toys), with no dolls or plushies for the girls. There's no sports jerseys and memorabilia. And the restaurants are pretty generic. Fortunately, there are several player mods with new skins, but they don't hook into the object filters. Still, it's a fun game and a nice change of pace. No disasters to deal with, just strikes and rat infestations.
Expand the review