Running a store for your niche hobby can be hard, but Supercar Collection Simulator captures what it would be like to run such a store. You run a small start-up business where you sell toy cars and toy car-related accessories. Much of the gameplay is managing your business by making orders on products, setting prices, and satisfying customers. Along with that, there’s also a collecting aspect to the game where you build up your car collection and use them for racing.
The Gameplay Loop
Starting out, you own a small store with nothing inside but a register and some shelves. The main tool you’ll be using for just about everything in the game is a tablet. There, you can make orders for products, check reviews, hire workers, and expand your store. The many proponents of all of those things I mentioned are, of course, money. Balancing your spending is crucial to advancing your store as well as keeping up to date on bill payments. There are many factors to take into account with spending and earning money. For one, certain products may be in more demand than others. You can find this out based on what customers are saying in your store and the market price tracker for individual items. Along with knowing the market price, it’s important to know when to when and what items should have their prices marked up or down. If items are too expensive, less people will show up or not purchase that particular item. If it’s too low, you’d be earning money at a very slow rate or even selling those items at a net loss. These factors are important to helping your store grow and keeping up on payments.
Collect n’ Battle
If you feel that the responsibilities of managing a brick and mortar store are too repetitive, this game lets you collect, sell, and race the cars that you pull. Obtaining cars is as easy as opening up a pack from your store’s inventory or going to the singles market across from your shop. Cars will be permanently marked in your collection, but if you receive a duplicate, you can either use those cars to race NPCs or players or you can sell them. As a bonus to pulling cars, there are card packs you can also open. These cards are used for racing battles as they have unique effects that can change the outcome of a race. While fun, it’s not always ideal to invest a lot of time in collecting. You still have a store to run, even when you have workers helping out.
Blandness of Visuals
Upon looking at the game’s visuals, it’s not hard to tell that it is quite rough looking. I understand that there are many games out there made by indie developers that look similar to this game. But, it’s worth pointing out those visual details as games such as this one can look like a total asset flip. It could be a stylistic choice, but a lot of the hair on the NPCs look like they mash several different hairstyles onto their models.
Just to get this out of the way, but this game uses AI-generated images for most of its 2D assets. This is also true for the cover art on the Steam page as well as for other games the devs have developed. Whether that affects how you feel about purchasing a game, but I can understand how some would turn their nose away from games that use generative AI art. I wouldn’t say this puts down the overall quality of the game, but this adds to this game’s visual blandness.
Conclusion
Playing through this game, I am reminded of a similar game that came out last year. That being TCG Card Shop Simulator. The concept of a store management game isn’t new, but both games share that similarity and that you sell items of a specific hobby. While the gameplay loop was enjoyable, it sort of wears at a certain point. Sure, I’m making a lot of progress in improving my store, but it feels like a lot of the same for each in-game day. There doesn’t seem to be any unique events or changes throughout the days. Because of this, the game loses steam and ends up being very repetitive. As of writing this, the game is still receiving updates, so there may end up being improvements to the game.
