User Reviews (1 - 11 of 14)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Don't waste your money!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 49 / 51
Date: November 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you're looking for a game that has bad graphics, nasty controls and is no fun then this is your game.
I play both 1st person shooters and building/strategy games and I must say this is one of the worst Tycoon games I've ever played. Here are the games' Pros and Cons:
Pros
It's only $20

Cons
It's $20 you can put towards a game that is fun.
The shoppers in the game wonder aimlessly around the various stores, never leave with packages and are BORING. There are no families, no couples, none of the individualistic small touches that are associated with the fun games. They have no personality at all.

The store graphics, as well as the people, are awful. You can't tell one store from another, they have as much inviduality as the people and that's pretty bad. The People and decorations have no animation. Yes, they move, but you can't tell what they doing. I should mention here that I can play both Doom 3 and Far Cry and they look great on my PC. So it's this dismal game not my machine.

The controls or lack of are abysmal. There is no zoom you just have to move the mouse around until you find an angle you can live with.

In conclusion, I wish I had waited until the reviews came out as I can't imagine anyone rating this game highly, it's not even mediocre. I wasted $20 I could have put towards Zoo Tycoon 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 or Children of the Nile. If you expect any fun from a game, stay clear of Mall of America Tycoon.

Quite Disappointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 35 / 37
Date: October 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

No manual included. No manual on CD either. There's not a variety of merchants (stores) available to "build" your mall, or if there is I don't know how to get a variety. Even after building a few stores, the same merchants kept appearing so you end up putting 4 music stores on the same section/floor of the mall. That doesn't make sense. You also cannot rotate the screen to see all angles of the mall, or at least I haven't figured out how to if you could because there was no manual. The CD insert shows how to install the game manually, has an overview of the game and a small paragraph about gameplay and a few shortcuts how to get around the mall. That's not enough explanation of the game. The tutorial also does not help. Very disappointed.

I wish I had read reviews

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 23
Date: January 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ok so I saw this game and went nuts for it in the store and had to have it.

You see, I lived less than two miles from the MOA for a while and I thought it would be a lot of fun to play this game. While is it kinda fun to play, the game does do some serious sucking.

Seems like all the people do is walk around.

You can't tell the stores apart from each other

You can't assign staff to a patrol area

The atmosphere selections are horrible, you get two benches, two fountains and two kinds of street lights.

Trying to center a store on the space you want to put it on is horrible.

There is not a lot of selection for stores and the store selection changes. For example, you may be looking for a small store and all you can find are large stores and you have no room for a large store.

Camera can not show the entire section you're working on

Camera is hard to control

tutorial isn't complete

the english is BAD. It's not just bad grammar, it's english as a second language bad.

You can't do anything with camp snoopy and you don't get any money for it but you still need to pay for upkeep!

The stores are not brands you know or are even in the MOA
There are grocery stores in this game and there are not grocery stores in the MOA!

The outside of the box makes this game look GREAT! However, once I got it home I was terribly dissapointed. The only thing this game really has going for it is the authenticity of the mall itself.

However, I like to accomplish something when I'm playing games and I own games like "The Sims", up to unleashed, Sim City 2000 and "Sim Theme Park" and I love playing them ,so I'm playing this, it's not as great as I thought it was but hey, it was 20 bucks.

The Worst Game Ever, buy a deceased hampster instead!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: March 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Where should I start? Well lets say this. If you are seeking fun then take the $20 bucks this game costs and buy a dead hampster, becuase a dead hampster is much more fun to play with then this game.

I bought this game at Target for $20, which was, what I thought, a good deal. I have played Roller Coaster Tycoons 1-3 and love them all. After beating those I needed more Tycoon. So I saw MoA and thought "cool I can build my own mall."
I installed the game and fired it up for the first time. Within 2 nano seconds I knew I hated it. The camera controls are as horrible as the company who made this game. I should have known that this game was teh suk when I saw Activision made it. Once you get over not being able to see your mall from a distance you then have to figure out how to build stores. This was no easy task, the floors are multi-colored supposedly symbolizing where you can and cannot build, this sucks. All i could do was build the same 3 Kiosks over and over and place cheesy benches to help the "customers REST." I then proceed to get messages over and over telling me that the "atmosphere and store selection" was not good enough for the lifeless customers that wander around aimlessly and buy nothing.
10 Minutes after installing it was un-installed and put back in the box to be returned tommorrow.

Over all this is the worst game ever made and should not be sold becuase it is a waste of money and is a rip off to trust worthy consumers who keep video game companies in business. I think that all people who bought this game and cannot return it should be refunded all their money plus compensation for aggrivation of having to jump through flaming hoops to install/un-install this worthless game.

Worst Game Ever!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: March 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This has got to be the worst game I have ever played in my life. It is absolutely awful. The camera controls on this game are horrible. There are little to no store selections, it makes no sense, the customers are soooo boring and don't buy or do anything that is meaningful. It looks all good and glossy on the cover but trust me, it is pure crap. I cannot beleive this game even costs $20. This has got to be the worst game I have ever played in my whole life!

Pros-Good Idea

Cons-Choppy Gameplay, bad camera controls, pointless customers, no instructions, cheap design, looks good on the cover, not worth the money, limited store selection.

This game is a buggy, glitchy, horrible mess!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: March 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Don't buy it. Don't even be tempted to buy it. It won't run properly. It crashes randomly, displays error messages constantly, and seems to be actually MISSING the entire west wing of the mall.

I have a machine that well exceeds the requirements and the game acts as if I am trying to run without ram. The stores quit without ever being demolished, there is no way to manually demolish them, and therefore they are useless space. Furthermore, the game refuses to run at all once I reach the point where it will unlock the west wing, and there is no west area listed in the menu where it should be in the game (which I suspect is why I can't get the game to run at that point.) On top of this, the entire east wing displays at 80 to 90 percent profitability, but nets zero dollars every year.

I bought this on SALE for ten bucks and I regret it, it is worth absolutely nothing. This is the only game I have ever actually thrown in the trash.

If only there were aa zero star rating...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have to agree with everyone else. This game was horrible. I actually bought it used and I thought it was a great deal at only 15 bucks. To bad I hadn't come online first to find out new its just about 20 bucks. That should have clued me in from the start. Avoid this game and save up for something thats worth it.

Worst... game...ever...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: May 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I love Sim games and I live close to the Mall of America. I got this game for $5, so I really wanted to give it a chance. Not worth it.
There are no instructions for the game, and the tutorial is really bad. You don't do any type of walkthrough, you just read a long list. I would not even call it a tutorial, it's a long, tedious, & unhelpful click through instruction manual. It explains a lot of common sense things, but leaves a lot of questions once you get into gameplay.

You start building the north side of level 1. To unlock another level you have to have all the stores up and running and 90% profitable.
I've only been able to unlock 2 more sides of level 1.
List of stores you can build come up randomly. You usually only have 3 - 5 things to choose from at any given time.
You can have all the security guards available hired, and it will still tell you to hire more because the security level is too low. Secuirty guys like to huddle around and hang out in stores that are out of business. Had 9 cleaners hired on one side where stores were going out of business and didn't see any of them, or any work getting done.

Runs very slow on computers that are a couple years old, tends to lock up on newer and older models. Has trouble loading saved games and will lock up trying.

Gameplay is glitchy. Sometimes when trying to build or tear down a store, task is not completed and the store will be stuck as a concrete base which cannot be built on or torn down. This effect will halt your gameplay as you will not be able to unlock new sections if this happens.

Overall game seems like it was quickly thrown together buy developers and never beta-tested.

One word: Horrible!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

There's supposed to be one thing about a game that's the most important to me: How long you keep playing it. For me, I only played for three days, and got bored of it! At least it only costed [..] bucks...

Cons:
1. There is no creativity, and you have a very small selection of what to put in your mall.
2. You can't really decide where to put a store.
3. The items are so, so, expensive! I wasted 30,000 bucks in just 10 minutes, and was very dissatisfied, so I kept making new games over and over again, but each one turned out really disorganized.
4. The symbols for each item a person's wants is so confusing! Example, the color red is for "sports" and the color blue is for "food."
5. You lose business easily.

I only bought this game because I once played Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, and I really liked it, but I found out Mall of America Tycoon was nothing like it, not even close!

I wish I could give this zero stars

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: March 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I made the mistake of buying this for my 9 year old daughter who LOVES Zoo Tycoon, thinking it would be similar. Someone must have sold (or stolen) the Tycoon trademark, because MOA is difficult to use -- it is not intuitive, and I cannot figure out how to fix mistakes (so there are trash cans all over the place and the stores won't land anywhere....).

Review Page: 1 2 Next 

Actions