Mall Simulator

A Mall-Building Sim With Real Addictive Potential

Mall Simulator, developed and published by solo studio F13 Games, puts players in charge of turning a modest shopping centre into a sprawling mall complex, opening stores across multiple floors, setting prices, stocking shelves, and expanding into new categories of retail as a customer base grows. It entered Early Access on 3 November 2025 and currently sits at Mostly Positive across 1,308 total reviews. The English-language sample pulled for this piece (100 reviews: 45 positive, 55 negative) skews more negative than the overall score, and reading through it explains why: this is a game whose reputation looks quite different today than it did at launch. On the strength of its core design alone, reviewers are remarkably consistent, planning a mall layout, opening new stores, watching escalators and elevators carry customers between floors, and expanding store variety is described again and again as genuinely addictive, with dozens of reviewers logging 50, 100, even 200-plus hours. The game picked up real momentum through YouTube coverage, with several reviewers naming specific streamers as the reason they bought it, and even many of the game's harshest critics are careful to say the underlying design has real, proven potential.

An Early Access Title Reviewers Increasingly Call Abandoned

The single dominant theme running through this review sample, far more than any specific gameplay complaint, is a widespread and increasingly urgent belief that development has stalled. Reviewer after reviewer describes the same timeline: an active, promising launch period in late 2025 with regular updates, followed by a long stretch of near-total silence that many pin to December 2025, coinciding with a posted roadmap that reviewers say has gone largely unfulfilled. Multiple reviewers report the developer deleting or closing Discord and forum threads that ask directly whether the game is still being worked on, which a number of reviewers describe as more damaging to their trust than the silence itself. Several point to small, visible details as evidence, Christmas decorations reportedly still present in the game many months into the following year, cited independently by multiple reviewers as a kind of unintentional timestamp on how long updates have actually stopped. Language across this part of the sample is unusually blunt for user reviews: words like "abandoned," "scam," and "cash grab" recur often, and more than one reviewer explicitly frames their negative review as a warning to others rather than a complaint about the game itself, several say they still enjoy what exists and would happily reverse their review if development visibly resumed. It's worth noting this pattern isn't universal, a handful of reviewers report the developer still replying to individual questions, and the game continues to receive some positive reviews from players focused purely on the hours of enjoyment they've already gotten. But the sheer volume and specificity of the abandonment reports, often from reviewers with well over 50 hours logged who clearly liked the game enough to keep playing, make this the review sample's central, unavoidable story.

Manual Ordering, AI Art, and the Grind of Running a Growing Mall

Beneath the development-status concerns sit a second, more conventional set of complaints about the game's systems as they currently exist. The most frequently cited is restocking: every order for every store must be placed manually, with no option to hire a store manager or automate purchasing based on stock levels, and reviewers describe this becoming a genuine chore once a mall grows past four or five stores, with one describing the late game as effectively "Product Ordering Simulator." Shelf organisation and stocker AI draw related complaints, items reportedly get placed without any filtering or sorting logic, requiring constant manual correction. A smaller but pointed thread of criticism concerns the game's art, which the store page discloses as partly AI-generated; several reviewers call the results inconsistent or low-effort, with product art in particular singled out as noticeably artificial, though other reviewers say it doesn't bother them or even find some of it charming. Performance is a further recurring issue, with reports of stuttering, low GPU and CPU utilisation despite the slowdown, and memory usage that climbs over long sessions regardless of the hardware involved, several reviewers with high-end systems report the same symptoms as those on more modest machines. None of these complaints are treated as disqualifying on their own by most reviewers; the concern is almost always paired with a comment that these are exactly the kinds of issues a properly supported Early Access title should be fixing, which loops back to the abandonment concern dominating the sample.

Value Undermined by an Uncertain Future

At NZ$20.49, value judgments in this sample are inseparable from the development-status question. Reviewers who bought early and got dozens of hours of enjoyment before updates slowed are broadly comfortable calling it worth the price already paid, several frame their playtime alone as having justified the cost regardless of what happens next. But the overwhelming recommendation for prospective buyers is caution: wait for a sale, or wait entirely until there's clear evidence the developer has resumed active work, rather than paying full price for a game whose Early Access promise currently looks uncertain. A few reviewers go further, suggesting refunds for anyone who bought recently expecting continued development based on the store page's still-listed roadmap. It's an unusual position for a Mostly Positive title to be in, the underlying game clearly delivered real value to a large number of players, but a growing share of the community frames any future purchase as a gamble rather than a straightforward buy.

Verdict

Mall Simulator built a genuinely addictive mall-management loop, one strong enough to pull in a large, engaged player base and hold many of them for well over a hundred hours. That achievement is real, and reviewers consistently credit it even when they're recommending against a purchase. But this review sample tells a story that's increasingly about the developer rather than the game: widespread, specific, and often reluctant reports that updates stopped months ago, that community questions about the game's future are being deleted rather than answered, and that visible signs like unremoved seasonal decorations back that timeline up. Layered on top of that are more ordinary Early Access growing pains, tedious manual restocking at scale, some criticized AI-generated art, and performance hiccups, that would likely read as fixable rough edges in a title with an active roadmap. As it stands, reviewers overwhelmingly suggest treating any purchase as a bet on whether F13 Games returns to active development, and buying accordingly.