Electronics Store Simulator Review (PC)

Digital Melody certainly has a knack for emulating jobs that, with all due respect to those belonging to them, are about as mundane as one might imagine them to be. This doesn’t mean that being a tech guru is a dull career choice; it’s that, due to DM’s natural tendency to regurgitate a lot of the same basic ideas, technology has the same appeal as coffee, vehicles, and, well, assault rifles, weirdly.

Of course, it was only recently that I found myself in Coffee Bar Simulator where, lo and behold, that same image of an emotionless customer and a cardboard box were presented to me on an oddly familiar platter. Yet, I left that role, still glued to the same visuals and notion that business sims were clearly struggling to find a USP. I abandoned it, only to eventually find myself at the foot of yet another storefront. It wasn’t coffee and cakes that I was serving, however; it was laptops and tablets, phones and cables. Electronics Store Simulator plugged in its data drive, and in the blink of an eye, I was back at the helm with another shift. The clock dialed itself back to the beginning of the day, and I was once again given the chance to wreak havoc in an entirely different field.

Electronics Store Simulator is exactly what it says it is on the tin: a shopkeeping simulation game that allows you the opportunity to build your own tech store and branch out into franchising, trends, and other cash-injecting business endeavors. In other words, it’s Coffee Bar Simulator without the coffee; it’s Car Mechanic Shop Simulator without the cars, and so on and so forth. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then be sure to stick with us a while longer.

Blue Wire, Red Wire

Electronics Store Simulator applies some good nodes to its played-out motherboard, including franchising opportunities, semi-open world exploration, and a built-in mechanical engineering mini-game that grants you the chance to tweak and tailor a wealth of electronic devices to then sell at your store. That’s about the brunt of the good news. The bad news is that, despite it harboring some nifty ideas, the core gameplay loop is almost identical to the one that you may have encountered in other shopkeeping sims. Not that this comes as too much of a surprise, mind you.

As always, it begins with a small business, a blank slate, and a subtle promise that, if you can pull all of the right strings and sell enough electronic goods, you will amount to greater things and, in due course, a trove of company benefits and profit-boosting items. Before all of this takes place, however, there are, of course, a whole bunch of hoops to jump through. Like your traditional business sim, you initially have tasks that either involve stacking shelves, exchanging money at the cash register, ordering and unboxing stock, or applying for small but seemingly beneficial business upgrades. This is all textbook stuff—fodder, if you will, that you would no doubt have seen a hundred times before. But, if the shoe fits.

On a Short Circuit

As it turns out, Electronics Store Simulator can be a lot of fun to work through. Or at least, the initial wave can be fun, at least. Yet, like most of its counterparts, there does, of course, come a point in the timeline where the entertainment value eventually dwindles and the chores soon become lackluster and repetitive. Such is the case with business simulators in general, I suppose.

Thankfully, there are several upgrades to pursue and some good franchising opportunities to capitalize on to help make your transition a little less mundane. It’s still a long process, and it does require a great deal of time and patience. But then, if you’re willing to stick around to see the business in its prime, then it’s likely that you’ll enjoy the benefits that tie in with the latter sections of the career mode. It’s finding the patience to engage in the same activities a hundred times over, that’s the tough part.

To give credit where credit is due, Electronics Store Simulator does bring a lot more to the table than Digital Melody’s Coffee Bar Simulator. Granted, from a technical standpoint, it still fosters a few issues that, frankly, could do with a little extra time in the oven. And the same applies to the audiovisual aspects of the game, too; they’re a little underwhelming and, well, wooden. To say that it’s a paper-thin composition might be a bit of a stretch, but to be blunt, it’s no live wire, either, and truth be told, it could certainly do with a little extra polish to help make it, well, spark.

Verdict

While Electronics Store Simulator does manage to elevate some of Digital Melody’s most undesirable snippets to establish a more in-depth shopkeeping experience, it sadly lacks the heart of a memorable game that’s both fun and satisfying to romp through. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy several of its key features—the fact that you can bolt around town and explore various franchising opportunities, for example—but the truth is, even with all of these fresh components added to its vanilla motherboard, Electronics Store Simulator is still a pretty generic game that leave a lot to be desired.

Given that there are dozens of electronics-based shop simulators on the market, Electronics Store Simulator doesn’t really fall into a niche pocket, or even one that yearns to be played. It almost gets lost somewhere, similar to how the word “cozy” often gets absorbed and pushed around by thousands of fledgling agriculture sims. That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, mind you. On the contrary, Electronics Store Simulator is, in spite of all its shortcomings and forgettable gameplay fodder, a guilty pleasure that feels oddly rewarding to complete. It’s still incredibly dull, and it doesn’t do much to glamorize the art of shopkeeping. But, if you’re easily pleased with all of those signature chore core trappings and shopkeeping genes, then you should be able to find a good game here.