Store Simulator 2018 is a parody game meant to mock Steam’s hand’s off approach to the low-quality titles they let into their storefront. With any random Joe being able to slap anything together and sell it to a wide market of people, it is no surprise that Steam has been flooded with terrible products for years now. In comes StarSystemStudios, on a quest to combat this toxicity by using more toxicity, alongside this reviewer gleefully adding gas to the dumpster fire via both purchasing and covering this title. Dramatics aside, your goal in store simulator is to gather enough in-game cash by playing the single available title until you have enough to purchase the other four included.
We start off with a simulated desktop screen possessing an icon of Steam which is where you can play your unlocked titles. Some of the other icons include Facebook that cheekily takes you to the dev’s page, an options menu, and finally, an Extras page whose sole purpose is to remind you not to take Store Simulator 2018 seriously as it is meant to be terrible. Oh boy, that is quite something to see before you so much as boot anything up, but it is important to set your expectations low and then lower them even further. Your first and only unlocked game will be a top-down shooter called Zombie City. You’ll have three classes to choose from with each containing different weapons. And upon starting it up you nearly immediately die by a zombie sprinting at you with such speed that even The Flash would be envious.
Funnily enough, they unintentionally captured the spirit of bad coding by having their games run multiple times their intended speed if you have a monitor capable of more than 60hz. Okay, so after backing out and locking it to 60 fps via Nvidia Control Panel since there is no in-game vsync option, I’m back to zombie slaying. And holy cow did I nearly go back to uncap it as the intended movement speed is so incredibly slow. Bearing your character moving with the urgency of a stoner through the colorful toy section of a store, there is not much to do other than shoot down some zeds until you drop. The map is tiny possessing little to see, the gameplay is bad, and you’ll be hoping against hope that the zombies randomly drop a few cents so you can move on to the next title. A few cents at a time you will eventually be able to afford two other games that only cost two dollars or save up for a five dollar one.
The lowest costing games are called Buzzle and Monster Madness. Buzzle is a breakout clone in where you take control of a paddle and attempt to smash apart all of the bricks. Simple enough, but the bloody ball will get stuck inside of the wall so often that I never did manage to beat it. Besides that, the controls were pretty subpar, so I was hardly tempted to keep trying. Monster Madness, on the other hand, is more functional yet an even more dull physics game in where you try to drive your way to the end of a level. You can select any of the three levels right from the get-go, and the third will be your money making machine as it is quite simple to rack up easy cash to see what else this title has to offer. Making use of the screwed up frame rate speed will make that task all the faster should you choose to cheese through it.
Forking over five in-game bucks will net you Ace Pilot X. It is easily the best of the bunch which isn’t saying much honestly and has you take on the role of one of three ships against an endless onslaught of enemies through an asteroid field. It is mostly functional though will get boring in a couple of seconds. Enemies are damage sponges, it is extremely difficult to dodge their projectiles, and you can take quite a bit of punishment, so most of the times you won’t even bother to move out of the way. Last and possibly least is the title known as The Quest for Achievements 3, a mini-sequel to the dev’s actual series. I honestly know nothing about this last fifth title, other than the fact that I’d rather try to win a fencing match against an electrical socket than grind up to the 56 dollars needed to unlock it. This is one of the few titles I’ve played in where I didn’t have the willpower to see it through to the end, and it does devalue this review due to that.
At the end of the day, this parody is neither funny nor enjoyable. Creating a bad game to make fun of bad games is akin to a friend laughing about how he threw up on your bed during the last party before proceeding to do so again. In the case of Store Simulator 2018, you are actually paying for that “experience”. Sure a single dollar will hardly cause even the most tight walleted of gamers to go bankrupt, but you’ll honestly have more fun setting that bill on fire, and even if you burn your hand in the process, it’ll be more enjoyable. I simply can not recommend this game to anyone despite how interesting its premise may be.
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