Happy Mall Story review: how would you like to be a busy mall owner?

Happy Mall Story: Be a Tycoon!! or simply Happy Mall Story is a tycoon game by Happy Labs that, as its name suggests, puts you in the shoes of a mall owner and manager.

Gameplay: because who said managing a mall should be humdrum?

So how does one run a mall? You need to build and upgrade shops, expand your mall, collect earnings, and attend to your customers. You have to look at which shop the customers are complaining about and which shops they frequent. Each shop has a certain threshold, that, when reached, will cease earnings until you collect the amount. This threshold is increased by upgrading the shop. The higher the threshold, the longer it takes before you’re supposed to collect the money.

Most of the time, when I play tycoon games, I usually just leave the game running and check back from time-to-time as I do other things. I was planning to do the same with Happy Mall Story, but as it turned out, each shop’s limit was low in proportion to its fast income. I found myself collecting money from each shop with only seconds in between. There was always money that had to be collected which left me no time to do anything else. There was no indicator whether the amount for each shop had reached the limit (and no way to check). There was also no collect all option or button. You had to manually tap on the coin icons hovering on each shop so if you had a lot of shops, and well, that’s a lot of tapping.

So in order to keep with my original plan of leaving the game running and doing other things, my next course of action was to upgrade shops to increase threshold. There was a lot of money coming in so I had enough to upgrade most shops. However, I only had two workers so I could only build or upgrade two shops at a time. Add that to the fact that upgrades can take fifteen minutes to more than an hour depending on the shop and that significantly slows down the pace of upgrading anything. So what I had do was to speed up the work, buy more workers or both. The solution to this comes in the form of — can you guess what? — in-app purchases. To spend or not to spend? That is now the question.

In-app purchases: you’re not blatantly punished for not spending money

Honestly, I’m not fond of pay-to-play games especially those that revolve too much on in-app purchases. In the case of Happy Mall Story, I like how it actually gives me an option to spend or be patient. And should I choose to be patient, it doesn’t become a horrible game by hindering my mall from improving. It still gives me the same game, but with a slow advancement and hectic activities compared to if I had spent actual money on it. This actually reminds me of real-life business where you can choose to spend a lot of money to make work as convenient as possible or do stuff practically and patiently on your own though that is tiring. I’m in the latter and Happy Mall Story actually allowed me to apply that in their game.

Audio and visuals: happy and dandy, but give me time to decorate this place