Lucky Supermarket is a Facebook-based simulation game where players run a small supermarket, purchase and deploy shelves, stock them with all kinds of goods, and serve customers and make money for further expansion and development.
The game is made by GameBox, the team also publishing Odin Quest, and Wartune.
Review:
The game manages to offer a detailed and realistic managing experience. You don’t just deal with the stock, decoration and service, you also have to find out how to deploy the shelves so that customers would walk by more of them and therefore purchase more goods. It also matters how you place the shelves, because nobody would see what’s on sale from behind the shelves. And since thieves pay visits at times, you also need to hire friends to guarantee the security of the supermarket.
All those details add interesting twists to an otherwise plain and ordinary social simulation gaming experience. Like many social games on Facebook, Lucky Supermarket adopts an energy system, where players consume energy to stock shelves and build stuff and have to wait for refill over time once they run out of the energy. And the key to becoming a successful manager again lies in how one efficiently meets customers’ needs, which are illustrated by the icons above their heads.
But the game also embraces unique additions. Players will seldom have to wait for the energy refill – they have to stop way before the energy runs out. That is because the customers are kind of accumulated over time, or to be specific, they sort of arrive at the supermarket bus stop at regular intervals, and whenever there are five or more customers waiting, you could let them in and start a service, which is the primary source of your income. As a result, you wait for the customer accumulation rather than for the energy replenishment in most cases.
But Lucky Supermarket has got some stitches. For example, the shelves which you deploy and place certain goods upon will not be open to other things and whenever you would like to introduce a new item into your market, you always have to add a new shelf. In addition, one has to click the specific quest button to confirm once that mission is complete before they could obtain the rewards.
Despite the inconvenience that might be brought by those stitches, Lucky Supermarket manages to mix the traditional social simulation gaming with unique and inventive elements and works out just fine.
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