[h3]Go from rags to riches, spreading diabetes along the way in Beach Love Shop, a matching minigame with tycoon elements. Earn cash, upgrades, and rally ladies who enhance your business with their perks. The base game is all ages friendly, though the free DLC adds NSFW artworks.[/h3]
With the look and simplicity of a mobile game, BLS is a casual clicker on a time limit. Your mission is to hand out candies to beachgoers, slowly filling your coffers until you can afford lucrative upgrades. These include a wider catalog of treats, to expanded customer seating, to boats & jetskis, and finally, a drink bar. As you slowly grind out the cash and fill orders, you'll win over the help of locals who come with perks to both speed up gameplay and increase your earnings.
The gameplay loop is essentially matching an order's image to a selection on the bottom of your screen. As you upgrade your merchant license, this will max out at 5 options, as well as two more on each side of the screen for bar & boat rentals. The real meat of the game is after you unlock everything, taking a frenzy of orders as fast as possible to maximize your daily bonus. This increments at set levels, capping out at $5k for 40, if you can get there.
It's hard to find fault with such a simple concept, but there are a handful of issues. For one, the game isn't evenly paced. There's a bottleneck to reach higher merchant tiers, where the game is most interesting, forcing you to spend the bulk of your time slowly grinding cash since your earnings are limited by both a lower time cap and cheap inventory. As you reach the endgame, most of the expensive upgrades don't add anything meaningful, such as increasing the prices of your cakes, drinks, and rentals. They add so little relative to the fee, that it's faster to reach completion by focusing on unlocks and ignoring everything else. Finally, the UI becomes a bit cluttered, and the busy screen can be confusing to pick out the orders from the colorful umbrellas and decorations.
The optional DLC adds nude anime style artworks, but is severely limited. You'll have to grind each assistant to complete their numbers for the goods, and you'll probably complete the game long before then. Additionally, the artwork is only visible on the main menu, covered up by the central text box. You can turn it off, but you need that box to continue playing, so there's little reason to do so.
As a casual game, this one is acceptable, but it won't provide much replay value. Once you've upgraded everything and earned the final riches achievement, there's not much more to do. Wait for a sale.
[u]Achievement Hunters[/u]: Unlock every sellable, recruit all locals, earn 100k. You actually don't need every upgrade available (can skip the mistake timer), and you don't need to max them out. I recommend ignoring the 2nd stage upgrades, because they cost nearly 1/5 of your wallet goal each, and recover your investment far too slowly--you can complete the game through performance bonuses alone. ~2-3hrs to 100%
[i]Thanks to Ylthin for the donation[/i].
