Dealer’s Life Legend is the newest addition to the line of “Dealer’s Life” games that span PC and mobile platforms. The premise is simple; you work at a pawn shop. Items come in that you can haggle a price for and then you turn around and upsell that item to someone else for a profit.
I played one of the Dealer’s Life games that’s available on Google Play Pass and I loved it. It was a very simple gameplay, but I was hooked on the wheels and the deals. So, when Dealer’s Life Legend was announced, I figured it was a slamdunk, no-brainer game for me to try out.
Spoiler alert: it’s just not as engaging.
Dealer’s Life Legend: Legendarily Good or Bad?
In Dealer’s Life Legend, it’s clear that they wanted to expand upon the premise by introducing a lot of other concepts into gameplay. In my opinion, it’s too many things. There’s this overarching story about being chosen as a special merchant who travels through the lands toward a goal, but I’ll be real honest, the details got swallowed under the amount of different moving parts.
Unlike previous games, you’re not in a stationary shop. You have a wagon that you work out of and travel to different cities to peddle your wares. The details of the villages are different and vary from being smaller settlements to larger populaces. Depending on the size will determine if they have more shops at your disposal or not.
So, where’s all the bulk? Well, not only can you do the standard buying low and selling high spiel. But, you can employ the use of potions that will aid you in various ways as well as hire someone to make the potions for you. You can upgrade your steed to make moving between towns quicker. You can hire different classes of people like artificers or wizards to help you with challenges you can go on or to help navigate the way forward in traveling.
Shops range from a carpenter, an alchemist, an auctioneer, and more. Also, I forgot to mention that there are powers. You can put stats into being able to haggle better or knowing the prices of items among other things. Unfortunately, your customers have some of these traits too which may make it harder to barter with them.
What I loved about Dealer’s Life was the balance that seemed to exist. Everything was easily laid out in front of you and easy to keep track of. In Dealer’s Life Legend, there’s zero balance. Not only does the amount of people that show up waver and is determined by how good your prestige is, but they all want to sell. Getting a customer that wants to buy from you is a rarity, which makes advancing a grueling, grinding pain.
Are we having fun yet?
When you go to the market, that’s your action for the day. So, you could waste several days just trying to make the sale, and all the while your bills are looming. You pay for your employees and if you’re renting a better steed then you’re paying for that, too. Also, when you want to move locations, that’s a giant fee on top of things.
It’s, honestly, probably best to just buy random crates from the auctioneer to guarantee better items, but I’ll be honest, I couldn’t build up enough capital to do that. I was wasting days upon days just trying to make a sale and I couldn’t get there. I could’ve done some grinding, but to get the amount of money I needed would take weeks in-game if not over a month due to the weekly bills.
It’s kind of ironic that they were trying to put some whimsy and magic into this series by giving it a fantasy setting. But, the game ended up losing the charm that it had. It didn’t need all the bells and whistles or the juggling act needed if you wanted to use the full expanse of the game.
I just wanted to barter with some fantasy creatures with interesting items and maybe that’s on me for wanting more of the game I loved. Sometimes, building upon a successful series makes it better and there are a lot of people that likely enjoy all the new additions. But, I’m simply not a fan.
To successfully do auctions, quests, or utilize potions, you first have to have the capital to do it and with 9 out of 10 customers only wanting to sell, it made things a lot harder to do that.
It’s grueling enough that I thought being in the starter town might be the issue as to why I was having a harder time. It’s a smaller town, so there were fewer people, but spending the 10.5k to move towns didn’t help. In fact, the conditions along the way to the next town actually incapacitated my helper.
Good thing this isn’t Oregon Trail or they’d have died of dysentery
The next town usually had more people in line, but the issues persisted.
The art is great and I can see the effort, but I couldn’t find the fun. This one just wasn’t for me. I wanted more deals, it was the thing that had me hooked in earlier series. So, for that to be so watered down and meh sucked the joy out of it for me.
Many people will likely disagree with me. If you’ve played it and you’ve had the time of your life, then great. I love that for you, but it couldn’t be me.
Luckily for everyone, Dealer’s Life Legend is still in Early Access, so we’re not giving a score and there should be more implementations that will, hopefully, round out the game.
If you want to give Dealer’s Life Legend a try, you can get it over on Steam for $17.99. Otherwise, I’d like to recommend a game that we did enjoy, PRIM. It’s a point-and-click adventure done in greyscale that features the daughter of the Grim Reaper coming to terms with her new life in the Underworld.
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