Comic Store Arcade

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Comic Store Arcade is an Idle Game released on mobile devices in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game has players managing their own comic book store, gradually adding board game tables and videogame arcade cabinets, hiring employees, and collecting cash at the register.

The presentation here is okay but not great, with simple 3D visuals for the store and the stick figure-like characters representing yourself, your employees, and your customers, the latter of which have various silly hats and hairstyles to add variety, which isn’t great but it’s better than nothing. All of this is backed by extremely repetitive music that you’ll want to mute within minutes of playing, and cartoony mobile-style sounds.

The core gameplay loop here works well enough, although the game hides what many of the purchasable options are until after you buy them, and there’s not a great variety of options either – you can add new comic stands, expand the store to make room for board game tables, expand the store again to make room for arcade cabinets, with each of these needing to be either maintained or supplied from a conveyor. You can hire employees to automatically do one of the parts of this process, train them to perform better, or put money into the pricing of your products, making them more profitable.

At least… all of that is how this game is supposed to work. In practice, the computer-controlled customers end up getting stuck on the scenery within two minutes of playing, blocking the checkout line and forcing you to restart the game to continue. And by “two minutes”, I mean I actually measured how much time it takes for this to happen and it regularly happened within two minutes.

Granted, there’s a little variety here – sometimes your hired help will collide with each other and get permanently stuck until you exit the game and restart. And sometimes the game will outright crash, saving you the trouble of restarting. But rest assured, if you play this game for any significant length of time, you will be forced to exit the software and restart it many, many times.

Or… you could just not buy Comic Store Arcade in the first place, which is clearly what I recommend.

tl;dr – Comic Store Arcade is an Idle Game where players nominally manage a comic book shop, gradually upgrading its facilities and staff over time. In practice, this is a horribly broken game where every few minutes characters will either get stuck on the scenery, forcing you to exit the game and restart, or the game will simply crash. Do not buy this abysmal wreck of a game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Winner:

Worst Game – Even the worst games should still, you know, work. I should be able to load them up and play them without them becoming unplayable within a matter of minutes, or simply crashing on me over and over again. And surely any game that had such a flaw would have to be ambitious enough to justify such a thing, right? Wrong – Comic Store Arcade is mobile trash through and through, a game that aims for the bottom of the barrel and somehow misses, a game that forces you to quit within minutes of playing it, reliably every time. You should all do yourselves a favor and not play this game even one time.

Worst Port/Remake – The runners-up in this category both suffer one understandable flaw – performance issues. The Nintendo Switch is getting old, and games are definitely showing it… but that’s not the flaw Comic Store Arcade has. On the contrary, this game’s extremely simple mobile-style visuals would be hard to mess up. Instead, this is a game where the Nintendo Switch version has the computer-controlled customer characters getting stuck every few minutes, forcing you to restart the game. And then sometimes the game just outright crashes on you entirely. This is a simple Idle Game, this shouldn’t have been difficult to port over, but apparently whoever was in charge of this had absolutely zero quality control, and the result is a game where the Nintendo Switch version is virtually unplayable.

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