Another Brick in The Mall is a lovely shopping mall management game with a tutorial that only teaches you the bare minimum. You might feel lost after the tutorial but keep going, it will get better! It takes 23h+ to complete the game.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 23h with help from some Steam workshop items.
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: To be faster with some achievements, you’ll start a new map or save file a few times.
Is there a good guide available: No, the achievement guide that is on the Steam forums is outdated.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, especially the achievement “Gross!” is grindy.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Some of them require a specific difficulty option, but I was able to get the one about the roads and about shoplifters on a file with unlimited funds, which made them really easy.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No.
I had been thinking about trying out Another Brick in The Mall for a long time before I bought it and well after that before I even started playing it. It looked like so much fun but how long would the achievements take and how complicated would the game be? I decided just a few days ago to give this one a try since it had its full release a few months back.
When I started the game and was done with the tutorial, I felt lost, at first… There are so many options but what should I do and what really works? I’m still not certain, TBH, as I can’t understand why some other workshop items make so much profit, while my own build, didn’t do so well but I still had a lot of fun with this game, once I started to understand more and more as time went on.
In my opinion, the tutorial maybe should’ve been a bit longer and explained a bit more, like; how a store becomes a specific type of store (sell over 50% of that specific item), or how opening times impact your sales. They let your hand go really early and only explain the bare minimum. I almost stopped playing at that point because I felt so overwhelmed but in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t and just keep on going.
For me, the hardest achievement to earn was to complete a scenario. I did do well with the first 2 steps but making 100k profit a day was a bit of a challenge and took me a while. I decided while working on that 100k to make all the different kinds of shops, to get going on all those achievements as well, and I got almost all of them before I got to 100k a day in profits.
What I’ve learned from that playthrough it that I made some of my shops, way too small. I thought since they only sell jewelry, for example, I’d only need 2/3 tables and 1 checkout. However, the one checkout caused a bottleneck and in retrospect, I’d now suggest having room for at least 3 checkouts.
A lot of the achievements are really easy with the help of the Steam workshop items. You can complete this game maybe even in under 20 hours. I took a bit longer because especially for the “Gross!” achievement I left the game running while I was working on my PC in another tab or when I wasn’t even at my PC. I sometimes missed a prompt that I had to click something in the game while the game paused automatically until I answered the prompt.
I would highly suggest to first enjoy Another Brick in The Mall, play around with it before starting to hunt all those achievements. Use the ones for selling items in specific shops as a guideline to discover what kind of shops you can make.
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This review for Another Brick in The Mall is written on 19 Augustus 2020 based on the Steam version which has 52 achievement when I write this review. The information can be outdated when developers add or remove achievements.
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