This store management game is almost addicting | Full Review - The Last Shop - Craft & Trade

The Last Shop - Craft & Trade is a store management game where players manage a town shop, selling weapons, armors, and supplies to adventurers in a survivalist town across an apocalyptic setting.

🟩Pros

+Borderline addictive merchant simulation

+Bonus gameplay elements like town building and hero management

🟥Cons

-Gets grindy

-Selling and restocking are done manually

Have you ever wondered how it is like on the other side? On the side of the merchant selling goods to heroes and adventurers? The Last Shop - Craft & Trade will exactly let you experience being one. Build a store, receive raw materials, commission goods like weapons and armor to display at your shop. Heroes and adventurers will flock to your store looking for valuable goods to purchase, and it’s up to the player to sell and earn money.

If you have ever played games like Farmville, Cityville, or the more obscure old Facebook games like Market Street, The Last Shop is almost cut from the same cloth as them, the 2D cartoonish visuals, the gameplay setup, the real-time waiting, and microtransactions, all here.

Gameplay Analysis

The gameplay of The Last Shop - Craft & Trade banks heavily on the addictive nature of earning money, and so far it works so well. This is done by continually selling goods to adventurers in an ever increasing cycle of crafting increasingly better items, in turn selling for more and more money. Both landscape and portrait mode are properly supported.

The tutorial is a bit long-winded, It was a bit of an information overload, but it holds your hand and strictly guides you throughout much of the many systems in place. I started off by putting a bunch of display racks that can store items for sale. Then, I also set up a storage for my raw materials. After that, I just crafted my first few items to sell and they’re up there in the display and a customer came and asked for it immediately. The process is simple but it can get addicting quickly.

You interact with customers manually

Now for the customers you can interact with them in many different ways, and it is generally tied to an energy system (this is not a play limiting currency), you can haggle with them, give them a discount, or redirect them to other items if the one they’re looking for is unavailable. There are also fellow merchants that will visit your store and offer many items to sell, if the price is right, a great way to skip crafting and have more items to sell.

Hero management and town building mechanics

Aside from managing a store, you can also hire heroes for yourself and order them to go on quests to the outside world for potential rewards. You can also view the city you’re in and sort of “invest” in the different infrastructures in there to get different boosts, such as an increased raw material production or a faster cooldown rate for your heroes.

As it turns out, the game is not strictly about managing a store, but rather it also includes managing heroes and building a town as well. It adds many minor flavors that makes the world feel more alive, among them also a Pet system that allows players to own a bunch, living in their store. You can also join guilds and invest with other players, but it’s not really a full system in place, but rather just another added flavor.

After playing for a while, the duration of crafting for the different items that you can sell gets longer and longer, but the rewards are getting bigger and bigger. It inevitably gets grindy and protracted that will require you to check in once every few minutes, hours or days just so you can manually replenish your stock and manually attend to customers and sell. I wish there is an option to restock automatically, but I guess it is there to ever slightly encourage spending real money to speed this up. 

Since Last Shop - Craft & Trade is free-to-play, there are a lot of in-game purchases available. From simple premium currency top-ups, to increased drop rate for a whole year. Like the merchant game that it is, the whole game is littered with things to spend real money on.

Conclusion:

Last Shop - Craft & Trade is a borderline addicting game that amusingly shows what it is like on the other side, as a merchant selling various goods to heroes. However, it gets a bit grindy later on and the need for manual interaction with restocking and selling gets tiresome to do repeatedly and overshadows the would-be addictive nature of it. It is still worth checking out if you like these kinds of store management games, especially if you are willing to shell out small amounts of real cash to fully enjoy it.