Amy's Greenmart (Dash-TM)
Options include Custom Cursor, Full-screen, separate sliders for Music and SFX and choice of Relaxed or Normal Mode.
Story:
After receiving approval for a loan, Amy opens up her very own eco-friendly shop. She'll meet both competitors and friends during her journey, and aims to have the very best shops around.
The story is very thin, basically serving as an excuse to open new shops and give us some nice artwork between locations.
Gameplay:
Amy's Greenmart has a much different feeling than the usual GameHouse dash games that I play. More focus on gameplay, and without story progression until you're between shops (no daily story-related goals to accomplish).
Being the owner you will manage every aspect of your stores, from ordering and stocking supplies to cleaning to making sure customers are happy and everything in between.
How it works:
Customers come in to browse and grab their choices, and you need to make sure that everything they want is available. Amy has a cart that she uses to stock the shelves (top for produce/flowers, bottom for stock). You can order more cases (shelving and boxes are color-coded) with a simple click, but it takes a while for it to arrive (those guys just don't get in a hurry!)
You can chain up to 8 actions at any given time, and if something comes up that you need to attend to in the meantime, you can cancel the chain to do whatever is needed.
Speaking of chaining, there is no bonus for chaining actions such as stocking shelves or checking customers out. Your money is made by keeping your customers happy, and to this end, they have a patience meter. The happier they are when they check out, the more money you make.
Early on it's easy enough to do everything by yourself, but soon you're going to need some help. You can hire a gardener, cashier, security, a janitor and someone to gather the baskets, but you'll still need to tell them what to do. In addition to the general stock, you'll need to activate some machines (for salads, drinks, bouquets, etc). The items needed will be pictured on the machine(s), and you just need to make sure the ingredients are stocked (on the shelves) before you click on the machines.
PRO TIP: You don't have to wait for an indicator to pop up showing that an action needs to be done. You'll be more successful if you stay on top of things and stock (etc) before it's needed!
There are a ton of upgrades to purchase in addition to the hiring of staff, and the strategy of figuring out most efficient use of your upgrade money is one of the things I enjoyed most about the game.
NOTE: The difference between
Relaxed and
Normal Mode seems to be how quickly customer happiness drops. This will of course affect how successful you are during the day, but it will also affect your
in-game/Steam achievements. You see there's an achievement for checking out 500 full-happiness customers, and that's really hard to do in Normal Mode since your cashier tends to sleep on the job a couple of steps away from the cash register. This means that if you wait to click until the customer is there, they'll lose patience just waiting for him to step over to ring them up. Annoying. >_<
Verdict:
With eight 15-level shops, there are grand total of 120 levels to play. I really enjoyed the strategy involved in upgrading and planning out my steps to have the most productive days possible. Had a lot of fun with this one, and am hoping they'll make a sequel! Recommended!
