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How to Make a Game about a Vampire Running a Store Dull - Weapon Shop Fantasy First Impressions

7K View2022-07-23

If you’ve read my reviews on TapTap, you already know I enjoy my fair share of pixel RPGs. I’m always interested in trying new games that bring fresh takes on the genre, but with so many retro RPGs being made these days, it’s inevitable that not every title hits its mark. Weapon Shop Fantasy is a pixel RPG that squandered my expectations.

Weapon Shop Fantasy is a shop simulator RPG featuring weapon crafting, armor forging, and dungeon exploration. You play as a vampire and manager of a store whose sole goal is to make money and pay back your debt by making equipment to sell to customers. The game’s currently only available as a demo, with a full release in the future.

Image Credited to Weapon Shop Fantasy | Indiecn Games

Don’t get too excited about Weapon Shop Fantasy’s narrative beyond that intriguing setup. The story is very much a what–you-see-is-what-you-get scenario, and that’s it—nothing less, nothing more.

See, Weapon Shop Fantasy prides itself on gameplay rather than narrative. It presents a series of ever-evolving quests, objectives, and items that provide an escalating gameplay experience similar to a civilization-building title. Throughout Weapon Shop Fantasy, you’ll constantly be upgrading and expanding your shop.

Like any shop, you need to sell items to make a profit. At first, you’ll hire one staff member to kick-start your business. As you progress, you’ll continuously employ new staff to expand. However, to do so, you’ll need to make items you can sell to customers to earn gold coins.

Making items like weapons or armor requires materials. And so, in addition to harvesting natural resources from ore and trees, you’ll have to send your staff members off to explore dungeons and kill monsters. Be careful, though; if one of your employees dies during an expedition, they lose all their loot. You’re able to monitor progress through a dungeon and can call your staff members to retreat if their health declines.

I found it’s best not to look away or ignore your staff when sending them off into dungeons. There are some harmless monsters like slimes, but there are also rat soldiers who can take down a weaker mercenary in one swing. Sometimes I would look away for a few seconds, only to look back and find I’d lost all my farmed materials because I wasn’t perfectly focused.

Image Credited to Weapon Shop Fantasy | Indiecn Games

After farming the materials necessary for crafting specific items, you’ll have to station a staff member in an area depending on what item you’d like to build. There are crafting tables, enchantment stations, and even a metal forging area. Each area allows you to make specific types of items—armor or weapons at the crafting table, melted ores at the forging station, and so on. You can upgrade and purchase as many stations as you’d like, as long as you’ve got the coin for it. Do note that you’ll also need to pay the staff’s wages every time they make an item, so spend wisely.

Once you’ve got all your items ready to sell, quests are the final mechanic you’ll need to know to play most of Weapon Shop Fantasy. There’s the main quest to pay back your debt and sidequests where you’ll need to provide unique items to customers. These quests provide most of the gold to grow your business and help you hire new staff.

Although quite straightforward, the difficulty in the quests comes from fulfilling the specific orders, since many weapons aren’t necessarily easy to craft. All the loot drops from dungeons are randomized, meaning you won’t always get the resource you need to make a particular item. I found the quests to be relatively dull, and the bits of text describing them were a waste of time to read. It was best to finish crafting what was needed and move forward to the next quest.

Image Credited to Weapon Shop Fantasy | Indiecn Games

Even if I had been a bit more into the content of Weapon Shop Fantasy, I would have been disappointed by the brevity of the experience. The trial version cuts off after little more than an hour, and inexplicably I wasn’t even allowed to replay it; the game forced me to quit as soon as I reached the endpoint. I realize it’s a demo, but that still felt like a wasted opportunity.

I wanted to be won over by Weapon Shop Fantasy, but it’s a long way from enjoyable in its current form. I’d like to hope that the full release will be able to make that leap, but it will need to overcome a dry storyline, dull mechanics, and extremely repetitive gameplay. In its current state, Weapon Shop Fantasy fails to provide the addictive experience of a truly great simulator and fails to meet my expectations in the process.

💬 Have you played Weapon Shop Fantasy? What’s your favorite simulator game?

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