Games fun at the core but so buggy it's hard to enjoy.

Haven't played the previous game, but this one seems to be fairly simple in nature. You buy/craft items, mark up the price, and sell it. Combat is just as simple where you swing or shoot and probably get hit; if there is any sort of special ability then I haven't progressed far enough to unlock it, but I don't see anything of that nature given the skill tree. I also haven't tried ranged combat yet. There are multiple skill trees and you can progress in each of them independently, meaning if you never go out and attack things you'll never get experience in the combat tree. You don't do any crafting yourself, but you hire the town artisans to do so for you and they seem to unlock more recipes when you improve the town; you can also find some recipes out in the wild. Movement is quite fast, so if you get motion-sick while playing games this might be a bit of a struggle at times.

I'm not very far in, but I haven't really had any issues with bugs and I was able to play online with a friend 8 timezones away without any issues. It is definitely more enjoyable to have a couple of people playing since you really only need 1 to run the shop and the other two can go out and explore, but you choose when you're open or closed so if solo play is your style then it'll still be a pretty chill time. I'm a bit of a cheapskate so I would probably wait for a 60-70% discount or so, but I can see folks going for a 20% discount; if you intend to put a few hours in then $10 should be fine.

Very much as people said. this game needs more love. there's some frankly really biggner work.I say this as a junior dev myself; who has literally done those things when I was first learning unity, and fallowing a book on the basics.

Thing the game needs: better culling. rn I can tell it just has a few spheres around you each handly different objects to have them fade in and out. tho the player camera should also have it's own occlusion culling and View Frustrum cull. if that dev tells me it is in I'd call him a lier. a game that looks this bad with ai this simple on this low of a setting should not run at barely over 60 for me. classic wow looks better in a lot of ways.

Second: there's clearly some bit of code that is either looping or flows over. as I straight up lag. like this is Minecraft Bedrock Edition. the fact I'm rubber banding is wild. tbh I can't make a good guess at what's causing it, but if I had to take a shot in the dark some bit of code is eating up the games slotted allocated memory with stuff piling up in the background.

getting more into the gameplay itself: enemies, and weapons need such a overhaul. robots needs to be buffed in a lot of ways. there needs to be more of a reason to expand your shop other then more space. because once you get bots you wanna compact since they can keep things freshly stocked. there's way to much running around town. doors are- aweful. not only do you get stick on them but npcs do as well. stuff like the elvin and orc trading is very VARY poorly explained. and some stuff just- never seems to sell? like food will sit on your shelf for days but armor and trinkets will sell like hot cakes. meaning spending money or time into making late games foods is so pointless that it's painful on your bottom line. and the amount of quests feel so- lacking. mostly just daylies that don't pay good at all.

would have loved to have seen more creative quests, like even just a few part story where you help a guy nurse his mom till you find out she keeps getting sick from a spider. or you help a kid get a cat out of a tree by giving her rocks. some one actually points you to fight the elite wolf out of town. maybe that guy telling you about it is like "look I'll kill it you know... after my brake." come back to him and he getting a bit testy with you every time you kill a boss he wanted to take out. just something.

all of this sucks- because the game has a bit of charm and potential. it almost hit the mark and in a day where shop sims are getting more and more common. the off parts stand out all the more. But no one has really done it in this setting with a town that you help grow.