Game Review: Pawn Star Master (Free to Play)

From Alpha Potato and Lion Studios comes another in a long line of free to play ad-spam games where you complete a handle of tasks over and over again in the pretence of running or operating a business. In this regard it’s all about a pawn shop where it’s your job to make a profit on the items you buy from desperate customers while also dodging fakes and reporting criminals.

A customer walks in with an item, it’s scanned on a computer where you’ll be able to see details about it including it’s condition and estimated value. Contrast that value against what the customer wants and if there’s profit to be made, swipe right on the screen to buy it. If it looks like a bad deal, swipe left and they’ll leave in a flood of tears.

Once bought it’s added to your shelf and you can polish it to smarten it up and get more money in a sale. No matter the item, you can polish it and it’s the same animation regardless of if it’s a painting, rare gem or action figure.

As you can no doubt tell, gameplay is pretty lacklustre.

However, there is more. Now, once polished you can sell it directly from your shelf for a profit or you can hold out until a customer comes looking for it. Waiting can be beneficial as you can earn more but holding on to item after item isn’t exactly going to see you rolling in the dough.

Something you need to be conscious of as you’ll quickly run out if you just keep buying. Not only that, at regular intervals a robber will arrive and demand payment. There is an out, a very sneaky out, but it’s there should you choose you use it. You can watch an ad to fight the robber off.

That might seem like a small tradeoff but the robber appears almost every round of levels and his money demands keep increasing. Should you reach the point where you just don’t have enough money to pay him off, you’ll be unable to continue unless you watch an ad. This also negates those hoping to get away with playing it offline. Sneaky and something that is becoming a bit of a reoccurring practice in Lion Studios’ games.

This might be ok if the game went easy on the ads elsewhere but of course, it doesn’t. Quickly becoming a studio associated with ad-spam, Pawn Shop Master, is just another in a long line of unreasonable free to play games.

Sure, you can remove ads at a cost but as always, it’s hilariously unreasonable for what you get gameplay wise. Pawn Shop Master quickly becomes repetitive and it won’t be long before most find themselves deleting it and feeling like they wasted their time. Yet again.