Recommended. A store sim with a little more variety and excellent UI choices that put it above a lot of its competitors. Let's skip ahead to what everybody's thinking: Retail Company Simulator (RCS) is just Supermarket Simulator (SMS) with clothes, right? Yes... but also no. Yes in that you're running a store, stocking shelves, setting prices, and processing customer orders. No in that it has a number of design choices that set it above its better-known cousin. Not all of the choices made in the game are good, but the good far outweighs the bad. Get that clothing moving! So insofar as the core game mechanic goes, it's pretty simple: buy clothes from a distributor, set up displays, stock the displays. Wait for people to pick stuff out, check out their orders at the register, get paid. Buy more stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat. Most of us know how these games work at their core thanks to the visibility of SMS. Where this game differs from SMS, though, it's significant. Most importantly, it moves much faster. Your prices on clothing are higher than on groceries and your margins are much larger. So instead of making a profit of $4 per item selling at full market rate in SMS, you're pulling in $15-20 per item profit - and some items go much higher. When you're selling two pairs of jeans and making enough to buy a whole case of them, you're hauling in the profits. As a result, the game moves faster. You can afford new equipment faster, new licenses faster, and new stock faster. This game feels more rewarding to the effort you're putting into it than SMS does simply because you see the effects more rapidly. Equally importantly, the UI of Retail Simulator is FAR superior to SMS, particularly in the computer you use to manage your store. Stock both on the floor and in storage is live-tracked like in a modern, proper inventory management system. There's no guesswork. You can see at a glance what your stock levels are and order accordingly. Navigation is easier as befits a computer in 2024: unlike SMS, this system is clearly designed like a modern OS and management software, using a web navigator paradigm. It's faster, smoother, and more efficient. You can also adjust all of your pricing centrally from a single master pricing screen. Morning setup is easy and efficient: you go into your pricing screen, take note of what prices changed overnight, and make your adjustments instead of having to go to each item on the shelf like it's 1991. Recommended pricing is listed with each item, along with your cost and profit margins. It's a well designed, ergonomic system. There's a wide variety of products to stock which is something of a double-edged sword: the variety keeps things interesting, but it also means you're going to have to hop faster and faster to keep everything in stock. At the same time, it means you're unlocking and stocking in new items, some with much higher margins, so the game keeps its pace up. (Jeans are your friends in the clothing business!) While it's a small thing, it is nice that you have store customization unlocked from the very beginning. Your first task is to name your store; you don't get to do that in SMS until you level up a bit. It helps make the business feel more like it belongs to you. But there are some threadbare spots Okay, it's not a perfect game. As previously mentioned, particularly when compared to SMS, RCS moves at a breakneck pace, and you'll feel overwhelmed occasionally as your store grows just keeping everything in stock and available. Hiring staff is a must, but you don't unlock them until level 7 (for a cashier) and level 10 (for a stocker). Until then, you're running around like a maniac trying to keep up. It's manageable, but if you have a tendency to feel overwhelmed it could get a little frantic. You can do it, though. There is a small realism gap present here that SMS doesn't have to worry about. You don't have to buy a variety of sizes of clothing. Everything is universal fit. When it comes to groceries, that's expected; there's no "slim fit" loaf of bread. But when you're buying and selling hoodies, not everybody is going to be wearing a Medium. Well, RCS ignores that. It's a valid concession for the sake of gameplay and one I'm glad they made - if you did have to manage sizing along with raw quantity, the game would become far too complex to be fun. But if you're a stickler for realism, there's a disconnect there. The game also doesn't do the best job explaining its content sometimes. For example, there's a basic clothing rack that holds 8 items for $100. There's a dual rack that holds 16 items for $300. Now, basic math suggests the larger one is a bad buy; it's three times the price for twice the capacity. That sucks, right? Well, no. Because what it isn't telling you is that it does this in the same footprint as the cheaper unit, making it twice as space-efficient as well as twice the size, and that's what makes it worth the extra $100. That lack of clarity was what kept me from buying one of the larger racks until I needed the extra capacity because people were buying jeans so fast (oh how sad for me, $70 jeans flying out the door!) and I realized what was going on. So there are some missing explanations that would help. It's not a critical flaw, but it's a little annoying. The Bottom Line In many ways, Retail Company Simulator is a superior riff on Supermarket Simulator. It boasts a far improved UI and control scheme, better progression speed, and all of the risk/reward-earning of Supermarket Simulator. If you enjoy Supermarket Simulator, odds are very good you'll enjoy Retail Company Simulator.
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