Within the first few minutes of Supercar Collection Simulation, I had the worst version of deja vu. Now, I have played games like this before, some of them more enjoyable than others, but that’s not the sense of repetition I am talking about. No, I have lived this experience for 10 years in retail, which is a soul-crushing existence when it’s enjoyable. By the end of my career doing that, I had come to a point where you would probably find me behind the counter with a Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Portal in hand. It wasn’t out of laziness; all my work was done, though I guess this falls under the new term of quiet quitting. In honesty, it was out of boredom.
Supercar Collection Simulator is another in the long line of simulator games that doesn’t really ‘feel’ like it is simulating anything. You take the role of a store owner who has, I guess, just recently opened a store for Hot Wheels-like cars. There isn’t much setup other than that, as you simply start looking in with some slightly confusing prompts to how to get started. The cars in the store act in two ways, as the player can both open the packs they purchased for the store, getting high on their own supply, or you can sell them. Interestingly enough, there is a functioning value system in the market price of products, which consistently shifts, with increases and decreases in stock price reflecting that. This was honestly one of the more interesting ideas on display.
Every day you buy stock, man the register, and ring up customers who are vaguely anime with eyes so dead they could steal your soul. This will pretty much eat up all of your time, and it’s not like this game invented repetitive gameplay, which would be fine if it were also fun. Everything needs to be done manually with some exceptions, so the register, for instance, requires you to click every item to scan it, take the form of payment, and then manually enter the amount for the charge or provide the cash back for change. I was hoping I could mess around and enter the wrong amount, which are things I never could do as a real cashier, but sadly, no. What you can do is break a hundred for a 13-dollar purchase… The fun stuff.
The game is still in early access, so there are a lot of options listed as coming soon, though their names don’t promise the break from monotony I need. In fairness, even in the demo, it doesn’t last forever. You eventually unlock race tracks that you can set for customers or you to bet at, but the charm wears thin quickly… And if you got lucky with a high pull in one of your boxes like I did, you probably have a car that guaranteed your win. Since the opening hours of the experience, as you slowly, painfully grind up your level for better options will see money go in as fast as you make it just to resupply, even trying to expand feels foolhardy. I never bought a store expansion without the buffer, but I never saw a way to get a loan, and the cars you sell start at three or four hundred for a shipment. Maybe the game has a built-in workaround around but it feels really easy to bankrupt yourself.
Eventually, you get a cashier or two who let you take a step back. This is about the time the game opened up, as I could focus on restocking throughout the day. You begin making more for sure, but again, you will see your money go pretty fast to keep up with demand. At least by this point, I could begin to expand without the fear that it didn’t have the resources to make it work. There are a bunch of items you can buy for the store as well as expanding space, but it’s limited and hard to gauge if it will remain that way. It was hard to keep three shelves stocked properly due to both budget limitations and the number of people pulling large quantities off the shelves, like the Pokemon fans hell bent on ruining Christmas for children everywhere, but my options were posters and more shelves… I barely felt I needed what was on offer.
Maybe there is something here that I wasn’t seeing. The game has a positive reception on Steam, which is great to hear, but it felt like I was transported years into the past, once again behind the cash register, watching the clock intently, waiting to be released from my prison. This is an incomplete experience, though, with more coming and to be added, so maybe they do fix it, and maybe it evolves in some meaningful ways, but as it stands now, it’s hard to recommend, though the cheap price means less risk if your interest is piqued. Till then, however, I’m closing up shop.
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