Tiny Shop

Mostly it’s a cute, fun game. Craft items, sell items, go on quests for items, trade for items; you get the idea. I’ve been playing on and off for years and what tends to happen is I get back into it for a few weeks and then the quality of life/user experience issues, which are minor individually but annoying in sum, make me put it down for months until I’ve forgotten about them and then rinse and repeat. By QoL/UX issues I mean things like: the crafting clock apparently and inexplicably slows down when the app is closed so that if I come back after a day, my items often still aren’t done; some of my items I have marked to automatically put out for sale in fact do not get automatically put out for sale; in trading you can see how many of the item you are receiving you have, but not how many of the item you are sending out; there are recipes that require ingredients that I have never seen, and there is no indication how to get them; indicator badges for some things but not for others, so I may miss that a trade train has come back but the badge on market never goes away because I won’t spend 100 gems or 850,000 gold on a license; when you first load the app you cannot zoom out all the way on your shop, you need to go first to city or world and then come back; etc. That said, this is probably my second favorite shopkeeper game I’ve tried.

I love this game, but I’ve been trying to grind gems to save up for the rarer blueprints. The reasoning for my one star review, despite the addicting and awesome game play is that there is no extra confirmation for spending gems. Therefore they want you to spend as much as possible so they can try and persuade you into spending real money for gems. Gems are a PREMIUM currency and you can only earn 1-5 per mission. While the blueprints are easily 150+. I was doing my best to try and save up for one when the game lagged and I accidentally hit the speed up version, easily wasting over 2 hours worth of grinding. Granted the game has no in game adds, which is a must for me, but the fact that there is no confirmation for speed ups makes me incredibly frustrated as my 2 hours where wasted in a blink of an eye. I hope they add this to prevent future players, with or with out reliable internet to waste their gems on. Honestly I rated this 5 stars before because of how perfect it was, but this caveat makes me incredibly frustrated and I hope they add an additional confirmation screen. I’d actually spend money on this game like I have for previous apps, but the fact that they don’t care if their customers waste their money, makes me absolutely not want to spent money on this game knowing that within a blink of an eye my gems could be gone.

Ads aren’t all over the place in this game!!! Yay!!! You can watch an ad to speed things up but they aren’t mandatory, and definitely not interruptive during your gameplay. That’s a huge plus for me with games nowadays, as unfortunately that’s rampant all over mobile gaming recently. Onto the game itself, I love it! It’s very cute and relaxing. You buy materials to craft items, and then you sell those items in your shop. You can plant flowers and herbs in a garden and brew potions to sell as well. There are heroes you can send out on quests and they will bring back materials, recipes, and other goodies! There is also a town where you can interact with townsfolk to upgrade different aspects of the game, or unlock recipes to broaden your crafting. I haven’t been playing for very long yet, but I anticipate I will be sticking around for a while! Thank you devs for a lovely experience!