Supermarket Mania 2 Review (Android)

Written by Craig Will (puffkix) Tuesday, 23 August 2011 11:00

Supermarket Mania 2 embraces the whimsical side of storytelling. The storyline revolves around the female protagonist, Nikki, reviving the supermarket chain of her Uncle Ross through these hard economic times. A sequel to Supermarket Mania, there are some returning characters like Torg who stole blueprints for human-like robots in an attempt to make human workers obsolete. The crux of the first game was that the robots couldn't match Nikki's ingenuity or bubbly personality. Like I said, strange is fully realized in the storytelling of this game.

What sets this game apart from the recently released and reviewed (on Android) Supermarket Management? To be completely honest: not very much. Both feature female protagonists forced to embark on a journey upwards through supermarkets due to a silly circumstance. Both require players to set up a queue of actions in order to provide products to customers, keep customers happy, and take their money. Both provide the opportunity to upgrade different facets of your supermarket to better accomplish these goals. And both are easy to pick up and play in the five minute wait during the commercials of whatever's on TV.

That's not to say there aren't differences. For one, the action queue in Mania 2 is linear and actions can only be cancelled starting from the last action assigned. So if the player sets up a 10 action queue but accidentally put reloading the cart at step 7 instead of 6, actions 10 through 6 will need to be cancelled to make the change, whereas in Management clicking on the action object would cancel it allowing it to be seamlessly reassigned. Of course this also allows for another layer of strategy by allowing different objects to be assigned as multiple action numbers (for example restocking the cart could be action 6 and also action 12).

There are also instances where Mania 2 tends to feel a little overwhelming with so many things to pay attention to. It's never a game breaking moment but it can be extremely annoying to not be able to restock a shelf because the milkshake steps weren't completed because the machine broke and the delivery man is standing there getting frustrated because you haven't given him his orders yet and the people standing in line are freaking out because they just want to get out of that place and new customers are mad because there's no carts available due to all the people in line using them up. Of course the challenge of the game is to not let it get to this point…

Overall, Supermarket Mania 2 is a more of the same in the time management genre but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Though I will say this: if this genre isn't refreshed soon it's going to fall the way of the other stale genres that clutter the mobile market *cough* Tower Defense *cough*. Until then look for Supermarket Mania 2 on the Android marketplace. The first 10 levels are free with the option to upgrade to the paid version in-game.