Merek's Market vs Shop Heroes
Merek's Market
Merek's Market is a whimsical shop simulation game with time management elements, putting you into the running shoes of a shopkeeper in a medieval fantasy period where adventurers are aplenty. Craft and sell a huge variety of useful items, be it armor, weapons, potions, or even… pottery, serve your customers as quickly as possible, and try to upsell your items whenever they decide to haggle!As you play, the levels get increasingly more difficult, making that shiny gold rating a real achievement to get. The game also comes with a host of twists to its gameplay, spicing up the typical time management levels with mini-games and funny dialogues.
If you’re a fan of time management games, Merek’s Market offers the kind of gameplay you seek with a couple of nice twists, slathered with enough tongue-in-cheek humor to make you bark out a laugh once or twice on every level. Although I’ve not tried the game’s co-op, its single-player mode is already very entertaining to play, and challenging too, if you’re aiming for that shiny gold rating. Highly recommended!
Shop Heroes
Shop Heroes is an incredibly fun and addictive, medieval/fantasy shop simulation that has some RPG elements. In this game, you play as a shopkeeper with a newly established shop that provides various types of RPG adventurers with their weapons, armor, and accessories. As opposed to only selling them, you will also need to hire crafters to craft the said items, and each crafter has their own sets of skills while each item will require certain sets of skills to craft. Thankfully, you can hire more than one crafter (eventually) and hence, you will be able to produce more than a few selected categories of items later down the road.These items can then be sold to the RPG adventurers who approach you at your shop. Selling to them, however, usually means that you'll be selling at market price, though you are given the option to lower your prices to earn Hearts or use Hearts to inflate your prices. Since most adventurers would want a very specific item to buy, which you may not have available, you can also use Hearts to change their minds. Naturally, trying to suggest a closer alternative to buy would cost you fewer Hearts.
The game also has RPG elements where you can recruit and send adventurers into various dungeons to earn special crafting materials that these dungeons only provide. There's PvP as well, where you can assemble a team of 5 to battle a randomly selected player's team of your bracket. Not to mention, you can even group up with other shopkeepers via guilds and work together on weekly challenges to win freebies, in addition to cooperatively building up the guild facilities so as to obtain a better guild-wide buff.
Shop Heroes is a game that is one of its kind because it not only managed to flawlessly merge both shop simulation and RPG into a fun and exciting package, but also to provide its game completely free. You can advance, albeit at a slower pace, in this game without spending a single cent if you like, but of course, if you enjoyed playing the game, you might want to spend some cash just to show your support.