Integrating crafting, questing and city-building, is Shop Heroes too complex?

hello and welcome to pocket gamer not business youtube channel okay the game we're looking at today is called shop heroes so it's been out for a while um and we did a first time user experience on it um again a while ago um but now i've been playing it for for um a bit longer um and it's time to kind of come to some conclusions i think about it so generally when it comes to free play mobile games i'm all for complexity you know but complexity in the right places i guess is is what we kind of require from games and shoppers has has kind of complex it has some very interesting mechanics um i'm not sure they're integrated well enough that's my question so anyway so um let's kind of um do some stuff so this is the kind of the main kind of or one of the kind of the key um i guess manufacturing parts of the game it's called shop heroes this is your shop um so i'm going to have a daily kind of bonus spin

so lots of games have this now a way of encouraging you to come back every day and you get some free resources and we can see you know there's some hard currency some soft currency a key some some soft crunchier one so that's the least useful thing to win um so i've won that and now we can see this is me the little lady in the elf hat um and then these people want some swords so this is kind of interesting so maybe he wants a short sword i've actually made some of these already and then if you look down the right hand side this is a different kind of things like a discount so i can um sell them some um cheaper i can surcharge and if i can see if i discount i gain some energy if i so charge i lose some energy if i compliment them um it depends there's a kind of a randomness there i can refuse to sell them quite normally should i do that i can sell them um in this case you know if i sold them i would just i sold it i would get one extra heart um my heart's back from anyway so in my energy no and i get 20 28 gold so we'll do that

to see my gold's gone up this person as well short sword i can't have done that and that's kind of interesting it's interesting what that has a kind of a it's not gambling but a but a um a modified way of of selling things um you're not getting more and more money but you say kind of energy mechanic i've never really used it to be totally honest um okay so i'm gonna get some more gold um and they get annoyed and they come back less frequently if you keep doing that so there's a kind of a feedback mechanism but for me it's just like i can't really kind of you don't win very much back so um i just haven't done it so that's a completely thing that's maybe too much for me okay this chap here so i can buy something off him again so there's a little nice little kind of mechanic there some people who people play this game a lot get really deep into that so that's kind of a nice thing for the long term kind of mechanic of the game but for people like me who

just kind of playing it for a bit um i don't even know what i'm doing with these pendants um then i think there's a lot of free to play games it's kind of a lot they are very complex because they're games as a service and you want to kind of play them for a while so it needs to have complexity in there um but how you lay that on and and and obviously some points please need to understand the complexity of what's not going to be playing so there's a crafting thing here so um a different kind of um weapons i can craft um craft a short bow you see it's just concatenated with time um okay so these obviously relate to the things that people coming in to buy so but we can see there's kind of like quite a lot of complicated um things here also a great i can upgrade that to flawless

okay spend some counts to do that so you can see that this is kind of got quite a deep system um and i can kind of upgrade my counter i can't have enough money i could actually not really instantly upgrade it with gold and then i can kind of upgrade my wardrobe to hold more things i can upgrade my metal workstation okay to um maybe faster my skill capacity is more so you see there's quite a lot of complexity there and then there's these other elements so this is the in so this is another kind of um kind of part of the game so these are we do quests they're again the automatic question not doing anything in them this character's just gone away and um looted something in this character as well just done a quest i've got some more high quality i've got a chest so i'm going to that this is kind of an interesting thing because i've got a chest um i can't open it i need a key i've got a key so i

could pay 25 i can't i can't do it so that's kind of kind of like an interesting kind of thing to keep you playing i suppose but currently it's kind of quite annoying because i can't open any chests obviously there's a random element in the chest you can see the possible prizes kind of call that catcher so that's um and there's these things here so old archives we can't do that yet so you're going to see see there's quite a lot of things i can't still do and i can't really do anything about that it's nice i don't really have to honestly say i don't really know why i can't do that it's probably because the power is not enough but i can't this that's kind of annoying so there's all these things here so in a sense that's kind of provides me if i keep playing there's these these blueprints i've only got one fragment of blueprints i can't do any of those for more high-powered weapons go back to my shop that's kind of integration in a sense um let's do some quests so there's this quest here which can i do no because my

power's not high enough so again that's kind of showing well if i work really hard i can get this extra stuff but when it becomes a lot of extra stuff i can't do then that becomes a bit annoying um let's go back to here this is since he's still going on she wants a great knife he wants uh pocket knives so my gold's gone up and click those ones so you can see there's a lot going on in terms of the the i mean that counts as gameplay resource management i suppose you can see those resources here on the far left hand right hand side there's 50 or 50 wood 16 um iron so we can go to the city and this is like another part and again this is kind of integrated in a way so this person's telling me how unlocking the rest of my town hall so this is my town hall how much can i invest is i'm investing the um soft currency so i've got i've got to have three thousand i've got to invest in total i don't have to invest all that one going um so that's what should i invest in invest in the

how much tannery movie at 200 so i could invest i think that's what i need level that up because it's increased my alley rates but next time it's gonna go next level is going to unlock um an increased hourly rate i'm the only investor so there's a nice thing that you could invest in other people's towns as well so basically you know so this is i think if i played the game more i'd be um i'd also understand it more um but at the moment i don't play enough and it seems a bit disjointed that there's a lot of stuff that i don't really know you know i can go through this this very basic kind of gameplay mechanic but the big thing i want to do is you want to find it i want to upgrade my shop really but that's cost me two thousand so i haven't got enough money to do that um the reason i want to upgrade my shop is once i upgrade my shop and there's all this stuff that includes my i mean i don't know what any of that is that's kind of items i can place to increase my energy but i've never run out of energy so

so yeah so if i have an armorer i can hire him but i need to i need to be level 10 to do that level 10 i'm only level what level am i level six so you can just see this i can see that there's a interesting long-term game here i don't think the interest is interests me enough in the what i'm doing is quite button pushing resource management um not really you know much variation of what's going on and i just feel a lot of it's kind of blocked off to me which is not to say that this is you know it wouldn't be a successful game and i think in certain certain certainly the developer and they were saying in certain regions they've been pretty happy with their success so particularly in turkey i think they've been pretty um successful and some of them maybe some of the more what we call emerging markets um they kind of felt like they've built a community i think it's very much again when you have a kind of tight community then you can do this trading and helping

other people out and that's really what does drive long-term retention for me just playing this on my own um it's just too a bit too complex for my small brain and just not quite engaging enough um so that's our quick look at shop heroes um don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel we do a lot of this analysis of free to play mobile games so um don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss anything and i hope to see you soon