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Mall-A-Palooza

Mall-A-Palooza

Mall-A-Palooza is an exciting click management simulation game where you, the player, are given the opportunity to prove your mall construction prowess. Colorful characters and delightfully colorful locations begin to emerge as you entice customers to visit your mall through the growth of new shopping potential. But be careful, it’s not as easy as it seems! Products break, stores get robbed, and a giant mall doesn’t just clean itself you know…

• 8 Locations of ever expanding shopping bliss
• 4 level per location, with a sandbox for those who complete all levels in a location.
• Colorful characters and situations
• Build, sell, demolish, and improve.
• Theaters, eateries, special events, plus much, much more, all for your building pleasure.

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Mall-A-Palooza Game Review

Love Building Simulation type of Time Management game? Guess what you get when you mix Create A Mall with Build-A-Lot kind of games? You get Mall-A-Palooza! Mall-A-Palooza is an exciting time management simulation game where you get to manage your own shopping mall from building your own stores, managing the workforce and of course responding to any issues that crop up from time to time.

When I saw the iWin’s banner for Mall-A-Palooza Game, (which was updated on the right hand side last week) the first thing that caught my attention was the game title instead of the graphics. The game title makes me rather curious about the game but the graphics look a little like “Bob the builder” or “Lego Characters” did gave me mixed feelings whether I should try the game. After reading the game’s description and running through CCG’s article posting schedule, I guess I’m gonna intercept this posting which was meant for last Saturday’s game recommendation for a game review instead.

Mall-A-Palooza has a total of 8 different shopping malls scenarios with 4 levels and a bonus level for each shopping mall. The gameplay reminds me a little of Shopping Blocks at first but instead of building goods area in a shopping store, you build stores within a shopping mall. It has a good tutorial and tips which gives you a really clear understanding on the gameplay without being annoying. As usual there are different goals that you are required to fulfill for each level before moving on to the next level. The goals can range from just hiring a new work staff, money earned or even getting the required stars for your mall rating. You can also get an expert ranking if you manage to complete the goals fast enough. No worries if you don’t get an expert ranking for the level, you can always click back to replay the level or just restart the level halfway through the game for a better ranking. In fact completing the whole game in expert ranking isn’t impossible and you can always rely on the bonus stage to work out different strategies.

To build a shop, all you have to do is to click on an empty lot and choose the shop you will like to be built. Once the shop is fully built, you have to assign a sales staff for the shop. Don’t just click anyone for convenience but getting the correct staff earns you an extra star rating for the shop. Getting the correct staff is pretty easy as all you have to do is to read through their favorite quote to have an insight of which shop they will be ideal for. For example, an ideal staff for an electrical shop will have the word “Technology” in their favorite quote. It’s not really a big deal if you hired the wrong person as you can still change it with a small amount of money. And after playing for a few levels or so, you probably remember which staffs are for which shops without reading through the favorite quotes.

There will be other competitors building shops in the shopping mall, you might feel a little annoyed at first as they build any kind of shop at random and anywhere they like. It probably destroys your chance of building a row of shops of the same kind for the star bonus but because the price goes up for the next shop with every shop built, you probably thank them for building it so that you can buy over at a cheaper price. It’s a good idea to get the bigger shops first before getting all the small shops as they cost much more if you drag on too long.
The nice part of the game is that if you are playing a certain level in the shopping mall, whatever new shop franchise that you purchased will be kept throughout the game and best of all you can buy it in advance before it is required in the next level. But of course do it if you have the necessary money and time for that level especially when your goals does not required you to earn a specific amount for the level. You can also build a shop and resell it for fast cash especially if the required goals do not need you to have a certain amount of shops for that level.

Now and then there will be certain incidents that require your immediate action like shop repairs or shops getting robbed. Hiring a repair man to deal with the shop repairs is definitely much more cost saving and normally I have at least 2 of them patrolling round the mall as it’s pretty difficult to spot them sometimes when you have too many people in the mall. I also find that hiring more cleaners is still a better alternative to trash cans as I rather reserve the slot for decorations instead of putting a trash can especially on levels that has mall rating requirements. As for shops getting robbed, it is best to keep at least 2 if you can afford. If you realize that you can’t earn enough to get a security guard or your security guard isn’t back to stop them, you can either install a security camera or if you are fast enough, just click the upgrade shop button.

Overall, I really like the game and I find it refreshing from the rest of the building simulation games that often involves properties. The only thing that I didn’t like was even though it has 40 levels including the bonus levels, I still find it pretty short. Oh well… I guess that’s what happens when you can’t get enough of a good game!

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Download and play Mall-A-Palooza now (Windows)

Get 25% OFF all downloadable games at iwin.com with promo code MARCH25 (valid through 3.31.10)