Dungeon Shop Tycoon

An Idle Shop Building Experience

Dungeon Shop Tycoon is an idle tycoon/simulation game developed by Metamoki. You are the mortal selected to help grow a small weapons shop into an armory for heroes! What starts as a small shop in the middle of the woods transforms into you managing a series of stores across multiple lands.

Expand Your Franchise

Your main goal is to level up the shop. The way to level up is to earn gold, and a lot of it. After about a day or so of playing you’ll be raking in billions of gold whenever you open the app. Of course, the prices for more workers and expansions are also in the billions.

After you complete your first store in Arpeegia, you’ll move on to different store locations. Each have cooler and higher quality weapons for you to build and sell. Watch as your weapons empire grows and you become the top seller of weapons and armor to would-be heroes.

Cute Hobbit-Inspired Graphics

Get ready for an army of Frodos to build your equipment because everybody on your workforce looks like Frodo mixed with Scribblenauts. The graphics follow the Scribblenauts idea of simple yet adorable characters with a vibrant shop that’s always bustling. The game format works well on mobile too. The store stretches from top to the bottom and players scroll to different parts of the store. The animations of the workers crafting swords and shields as a magical trolley collects their finished products are consistent and engaging. This gives players the feeling of a lively shop for adventurers to visit.

Simple and Filled with References

Gameplay is easy considering you don’t have to do anything to play. After you set up your first crafting table you can sit back and let your worker do the heavy lifting. Tapping workers increases their productivity so it’s good to give them a boost when you’re trying to earn more gold. As you upgrade your crafting tables and hire more workers, your idle productivity will skyrocket. Leave the game alone for a while and come back to a pile of gold!

My favorite part of the game are the shop managers who reference real life mythology and celebrities. Jeff Golemberg reduce the price of upgrades while His-Man boosts the duration of power ups and bonuses. These different bonuses really help when you’re going for a high-priced upgrade. Shop managers have upgrades that boosts their effects. The game gives you free chests that contain the materials needed to upgrade your shop managers.

Microtransactions Galore

Like almost any mobile game on the market, Dungeon Shop Tycoon has microtransactions. The good news is you can safely stay away from them and still progress quickly through the game. I never felt behind when upgrading my store and was able to purchase whatever upgrade needed.

Upgrading shop managers, weapons and armors takes time though, as each requires materials that you only receive from free chests. The game gives you free chests every six hours. Players that want to skip the wait can pay for Rubies to buy chests with better gear. 650 Rubies costs $4.99 and you can get three of the cheapest chests with that amount. Higher tier chests start at 750 so Ruby purchases stack up fast.

Repetitive and Plain

Obviously as an idle tycoon simulator the game becomes stagnant over time. Players with short attention spans or who prefer action-packed games won’t be interested in Dungeon Shop Tycoon.

Though the animation is fun to watch, it can become boring to see Scribblenauts Frodo bang his hammer for the 100th time. Players may find themselves leaning more towards idle gameplay over actively trying to boost production. It is an idle game, but players may lose interest and delete it without a more active way to play.

Lacking interesting features and unique gameplay, Dungeon Shop Tycoon falls into the same repetitiveness of other tycoon games.

Overall, people will enjoy playing Dungeon Shop Tycoon with its fun references and cute DS-like graphics. Whether or not people will continue to play past the first month is less clear.