Supermarket Tycoon

Supermarket Tycoon is, well, barely qualifying as a tycoon game. It's an abandoned early access train wreck that looks more like someone's homework project (they failed the course, and in fact was held back a year after they submitted this for their assignment). It's really so bad, and not just because of the crap technical implementation (more on that later). The fundamental game design here is terrible... you have to manually click on each stock item you buy then click where to put it... it's a joke, it's so lazily put together. Trying to play this game seriously may cause mental harm, so please be careful. That's how bad this shovelware is. The game was abandoned roughly 2 months after launch and hasn't been updated in over 5 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 11 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers. Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay. Supermarket Tycoon is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer, this is impossible to recommend.