Game Review: Fashion Universe (Mobile – Free to Play)

From our least favourite and favourite free to play developer, Voodoo comes Fashion Universe. One the developer’s strongest offerings on the free to play market thanks to its simple gameplay, hidden depth and addictive qualities.

You own a fashion store and you need to get both the customers and money rolling in. The former won’t take too long to come through the doors and start buying your stock but quickly, your racks will become bare. It’s up to you to constantly restock as fast as possible to keep the customers happy and money rolling in.

At first, it’s monotonous as your forced to do too many things by yourself. However, once the money starts coming in you can start hiring staff and upgrading things. This is where the game starts to get good. Use money earned to hire a cashier so all you must do is collect the piles of cash. Struggling to keep up with the restocking? Especially as you upgrade the store’s size and increase the number of racks? Hire some assistants to help you out. Then upgrade their speed and carrying capacity to make restocking a breeze. Even more so if you upgrade yourself to carry more and increase the speed of collecting new stock.

In addition to those upgrades, as you expand more customer options become available. Which include their carrying capacity (more sales), their speed (faster money) and getting VIPs to visit. These are wealthy shoppers who will strip your racks but will leave big tips. A very useful way to get money fast.

Watching your store grow and grow to the point where the money is literally piling up is cool and the experience can be a lot of fun.

However, the game has some notable flaws. The most obvious being the lack of variety. All the clothes are the same and the repetition of getting stock, putting stock on racks and collecting the money starts to get old. This is made all the worse as you start to max out the upgrades. There comes an inevitable moment where it all just starts to feel pointless as there’s nothing more to unlock aside from increasing your own speed and carrying capacity.

It’s at this point that most will probably call it quits and delete the game. Provided they haven’t been driven mad by the ad-spam already.

Yes, as per normal with Voodoo games, Fashion Universe is a nightmare for ads. What makes it worse than normal though is how they constantly interrupt gameplay. There are no levels here, the game is free-flowing and then bang, here’s an ad. They come around in quick succession too. You won’t go 30 to 60 seconds without hitting one and it is infuriating. To make matters worse, the new Voodoo staple of forcing you to play with an internet connection is once again present. There’s no turning off wi-fi here to get around the ad assault sadly.

£2.49 to remove ads? It’s almost worth it but bear in mind the aforementioned point of no return. You’ll probably get a decent hour out of it before that hits though.