Retail Therapy Review

Retail Therapy is a fashion retail sim that also lets you deck an avatar out in fabulous clothes. Basically, it’s the same game as 6waves’s import Mall World, but with better graphics and a more Western sensibility behind the clothing brands and designs featured

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

Retail Therapy lets you zone out as you build up your own bustling fashion boutique (and give yourself a virtual makeover).

Retail Therapy is a fashion retail sim that also lets you deck an avatar out in fabulous clothes. Basically, it’s the same game as 6waves’s import Mall World, but with better graphics and a more Western sensibility behind the clothing brands and designs featured. Where Mall World mostly features original designs, Retail Therapy features tons of real-world brands like Gap, Banana Republic, and Diane von Furstenberg. You can sell these clothes to customers to make money, deck your avatar out in the finest fashions you can afford, and design outfits for friends and passersby to earn more cash.

Retail Therapy

Playing Retail Therapy will feel pretty familiar if you’ve ever played any sort of store-running sim. You can order so many different types of merchandise at a time. The more quantity you order at a time, the longer it takes to for your delivery to get there. Your store’s reputation improves if you can keep selling goods to customers without running out. Some merchandise has to hang on a rack while other types need to be folded and set out on a table, so you need to balance how you display your merchandise and what you order. As you gain experience and level up, you can eventually hire Facebook friends to help run your store.

It’s very important that you hire someone as soon as possible, because playing Retail Therapy is mildly unbearable until you can. While the game’s 3D visuals for avatars are great, they also seem to necessitate that objects in the game move very slowly. Early on in Retail Therapy, it’s easy to miss sales because your avatar moves so slowly that you may not be able to clean out a stock bay before a waiting customer just gets angry and leaves. It’s frustrating because the game lets you queue actions but there’s no way to un-queue them and no way to speed them up. It doesn’t seem to be part of the game’s strategy, either, because once you can hire an assistant you’ll never have problems with missed customers again.

Retail Therapy

There’s little wrong with Retail Therapy as a game. Once more features are added, it might very well become one of the best in its category. For now, the worst that can be said about it is that it’s a fairly standard example of a Facebook fashion sim, with good graphics, a nice selection of brand merchandise, and really slow avatars.

The good

    The bad

      60 out of 100