Merchants of Kaidan

Genre: Trading Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Merchants of Kaidan is a Trading Simulation game with a focus on arbitrage, the practice of buying low in one location and selling high in another to turn a profit – compare this to games like Star Trader, Trade Wars, and Dope Wars, to give you an idea what you’re in for.

Here, you’ll start by trading in just two resources, food and furs, and gradually move on to others as your status rises. In addition, you’ll be investing in businesses, encountering events that can change your luck, and taking on quests that can help increase your fortune and status.

All of this sounds good, but the game is plagued by problems. Firstly, there are a lot of events in this game that are completely out of your control. A woman with empty buckets passes in front of your cart? Your luck stat goes down. Encouraged to bet on a race? Refuse and you may suffer unintended consequences from disheartened staff… whenever one of these events happens, it’s always frustrating.

It doesn’t help that the game is difficult enough as-is. The costly business of simply getting from one place to another can lead to slim margins, and you’re discouraged from exploiting a good route because it could lead to robbers attacking you… and even if you find something that works well for you, misfortune could always strike anyway.

Also, much of the information that you need is either nestled away in menus, or not available to you at all, and none of it is presented in a helpful or user-friendly manner. At multiple points, I was approached by someone who wanted to be taken to a specific place, but I wasn’t given a chance to check my map before agreeing or refusing, and couldn’t locate the place on the map afterward – there certainly wasn’t anything highlighting the place or denoting it as a destination.

Even if you’re fine with all of this oppressive difficulty and poor luck, and lack of helpful information, the game still makes playing it a frustrating chore, with menus that have you dragging a slow cursor across the screen instead of simply snapping to the options you can click on. This game wasn’t made for consoles, and it shows. Thankfully, you can use the touchscreen for menus in handheld mode, but it’s frustrating that this should even be necessary just to not have to be tortured by the tedium of selecting choices in menus.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, during my time playing this game, it outright crashed on me multiple times. I swear, I went into this game actually excited to play a good trading sim, and it seemed to want to do everything it could to make me absolutely hate it.

At the very least, the game’s visuals and music are pleasant enough. I mean, not enough to justify all the crashing this game is doing, but they’re nice.

I’m sure that those who can stick with it despite its many, many flaws will find some fun to be had in Merchants of Kaidan, but I personally cannot remember the last time I was this disappointed in a game. It’s a shoddy port of a game that relies far too heavily on luck, doesn’t properly convey important information to players, has terrible interface issues, and just overall is not fun to play.

tl;dr – Merchants of Kaidan is a “buy low”/”sell high” Trading Simulation game with a good presentation but that fails in pretty much every other area. The game depends far too heavily on luck, important information is not readily available to the player, the controls are atrocious, and the game repeatedly crashes. Avoid this one.

Grade: D-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Winner:

Most Disappointing – I love the concept of this game so much – the idea of building a trading empire in a fantasy world sounds amazing! However, terrible controls, a game that stacks the deck against you, and game-crashing bugs all worked to make my time with this game absolutely miserable.

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