A review code was used, and many thanks to Christophe KASH.
MyPawnShop is a simulation game that allows you to run a little pawn shop. You can sell items to NPCS and buy items from them to sell yourself, filling up your little shop and bringing in loads of customers.
What Is MyPawnShop Like to Play?
MyPawnShop is a pretty standard shop-running simulation game. You need to place displays and fill them with items. It’s very slow to start, but you can buy items from customers, clean and fix them, then place them on the displays. There is a thriving little town around you where you can have items appraised, buy cleaning and repair kits, and play mini-games. After you get some money, you can add more displays and things to your shop to make it hold more items, so you can sell more things.
I Don’t Think This Game Is Worth Playing
MyPawnShop had many issues. I started playing it and hard-locked myself twice trying to complete the tutorial because the game didn’t like the order in which I was doing things. If you don’t follow the tutorial exactly, it can lock you out of being able to keep going. I kept messing it up partly because I found the poorly translated wording kind of difficult to understand, and the store locations you are supposed to go to were not intuitive to find.
Overall, the layout of the map in MyPawnShop is poorly executed. The gun store, the repair shop, and the cleaning-items store, all places you have to go to frequently, are all in the same building halfway across town. However, the buildings closest to you are filled with stores you can’t even interact with. There is no reason why you need to be traipsing all over town, running from location to location, other than the developer just wanted to make the town that big.
I think this was a very big error on the developer’s part; since MyPawnShop is trying to load a town much bigger than it needs to be, it runs pretty poorly. Even with the graphics kind of low, I still ended up with a lot of stuttering frame rates. I have a feeling most people would have a lot of trouble even getting this game to run.
The gameplay itself didn’t seem to make much sense either. Here’s a good example: I bought an item from a customer, then went and got it appraised. It was worth $345 as is, so I figured I would take it home, do some repairs and cleaning on the item, then bring it back to see how much I could raise the value. After spending money on repair kits and cleanings, I took the object back to have it valued again: it was worth $345. So I spent all the money and time to repair it for literally nothing.
I also encountered many bugs, including one that would not let me place anything until I closed and reopened the game, clipping through things I wasn’t supposed to, and other such issues. In my opinion, MyPawnShop is not finished enough to be considered an Early Access game; it needs a lot more time in development. If I had spent my hard-earned money on this one, I would have gotten a refund almost immediately from Steam.
Final Thoughts
MyPawnShop has okay-looking graphics, fine sound design, and a lively little town. However, all of that doesn’t make up for how unintuitive and unfun I found the game overall. While I think it has a lot of potential, as it has a good foundation, it’s nowhere near ready for people to pay to play it.
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The issue with MyPawnShop’s poorly translated wording and unintuitive store locations really stood out to me, as I’ve experienced similar frustrations in other simulation games. I think the developer’s decision to prioritize a large town size over optimized gameplay and performance was a mistake, as it leads to stuttering frame rates and a poor user experience. I’ve found that games like this often benefit from a more streamlined design, and a resource like a game development forum could be helpful in identifying and addressing these issues.