Supermarket Mania Review: Grocery Shopping without the High Cost or Tired Feet

Meryl

With the price of groceries going up by the minute, Supermarket Mania offers a great deal in keeping you busy for hours avoiding a trip to the grocery store. Like the coffee shop on every corner, Torg has supermarkets all over town giving Nikki little choice but to go work there as a stocker.

Nikki doesn’t like the looks of Torg when scary-looking robots greet her on her first day of work. After four days of excellent work, Mr. Torg fires her and her cashier friend. He activates the robots to run his stores. The girls find a better place in a run down pop store (well, there’s no mom as far as we can see) run by Mr. Clarence. He trusts the girls to run the store alone.

The girls deal with different types of customers who have different styles of shopping. Granny takes her time and has plenty of patience while teens have zero patience and move quickly. Kids tear up the place until you have your security guard friend, Mr. Barefist (I wonder how they came up with that), blow the whistle to stop their antics. Barefist also comes in handy in stopping brazen thieves.

You have two ways to catch a thief. Notify Barefist while the thief has a circle over his head to stop the thief who moves on to the next attempt or leaves the store. Or be patient and let the circle over the thief’s head fill and shake — alert Barefist at that time and you earn a cash bonus. However, the shaky thing doesn’t happen every time so waiting for a full circle could lead to thief getting away with … well, theft.

Upgrades are present ranging from better products that sell for more money and a gumball machine for more tips to a faster loading stockroom and the most expensive one, a bigger cart. As you advance levels more upgrades show up to help keep customer patience from spiraling when so many require your time in stocking the shelves.

Occasionally, a celebrity shops at the store catching the attention of all shoppers who stand by snapping pictures. While the celeb works around the store, Nikki must keep shelves stocked for celebrities as they don’t wait long. Another unique feature in Supermarket Mania is Super Shop. Click the thumbs up symbol at the right time (when you have as many shoppers as possible and as few thieves as possible) so that everyone buys a bunch at once. This drives up sales and Nikki’s carting work as she races around refilling the fast emptying shelves.

The action spreads across five shopping stores including Torg’s for 50 levels. That’s right, Mr. Clarence somehow comes up with the cash for more stores. Nothing illegal mind you. He’s good people.

The game lasts a couple of sittings and gets nutty at times. I’ve yet to beat a Diner Dash (but I made it through Wedding Dash), and I finished Supermarket Mania. It meant repeating a few levels, but all in a game reviewer’s work. So I think the difficulty is on target for the average casual gamer.

Animation and cartoon-style graphics are bright and attractive. The music upbeat with good effects. Decent variety of upgrades and a nice even pace. Animation and cartoon-style graphics are bright and attractive. The music upbeat with good effects. Decent variety of upgrades and a nice even pace.

Supermarket Mania probably falls in the middle of the time management games. Far better than those at the bottom, but not quite as good the best. You’ll spend less money on the game than in a five minute trip to the grocery store and have loads more fun.

We give Supermarket Mania a 3.5/5 diamond rating