Mystic Emporium

If you like time management games then you will love Mystic Emporium by 99 Games. The aim? Help Lilly, the young witch, fulfill her ambition of running her own little magic shop by making magical potions for your customers.

Overall, the game is very easy to play and if you happen to have played games like this before, straight away you will notice Mystic Emporium is exactly the same as the others, just obviously set in a different environment. You start off with the tutorial and you are shown what Lilly needs to do. The basics are, every time a customer enters the shop you tap on them and a little icon pops up telling you what they’d like. You then go to the shelf to get the book which corresponds with that potion and pop it in the cauldron. It will then tell you want ingredients to add to the mixture, you get them off the shelf and drop them in. You mix the solution up and when ready, give it to the customer. This process is repeated over and over with each customer until the shop closes. The shop closing is just the game on a timer, you have a certain amount of gold to achieve before the timer on each level runs out and the shop closes. As you progress through the game, each level gets harder and harder in difficulty.

The customers that enter your shop are a variety of people. Well .. when I say people, I’m not sure if they are actually human, so maybe we should just call them characters. Among them you encounter witches, wizards, vampires, ogres altogether a mix of 7 and all make their own little strange noises. There are 24 levels in the game and each time you move on to the next, you earn trophies and magic charms. Altogether, there are 12 magical items to unlock. As you progress further into the game you’ll gain the task of making more potions with mixtures of a variety of different ingredients. Each potion successfully sold results in you earning gold coins. The more coins you collect, the more you have to purchase upgrades. This is the same again as many other time management games. You start off with the basics and then when you earn more you can get tools that making your potion making faster and better. So, for example, I got Lilly some ”˜go faster’ shoes that help her speed around the shop super fast. I’m also now saving to get a better cauldron that brews the potions faster. All these upgrades help you reach your next level and earn more coins in a quicker more speedy manner.

In between making the potions for your customers, you have mini-games to complete. These are match three type puzzle games. The puzzles consist of shapes and colours appearing on your screen and you have to match three or more of each. Each time you get a match it fills a tiny bottle with a little potion, when you have done enough to fill the potion bottle the level is completed and you then have a new potion to sell. I like these little breaks from the game’s repetitive nature, because it just makes the game seem to have a little more variety.

The controls at times were a bit hard to navigate. I have tiny fingers, so not sure how anyone with bigger hands would fair. The buttons to tap each potion or ingredient are very tiny and it was quite easy to tap the wrong one by mistake, which when you do, slows you down because then you have to throw the potion away and start all over again!

If you have ever played this type of game genre before, you will notice pretty much straight that there is little new here. Its the same repetitive routines, styles and even the mini games have been done before in for example, Chocolate Shop Frenzy.

That’s not to say though that the game isn’t good, because it is. The graphics and sound effects are well suited and make it an enjoyable game. It just would have been nice if there had been something different to it compared to the other games in its genre. Something that could have made it stand out from the rest. Maybe that’s something the developers might want to consider focusing on for future updates?