SweatShop

If I had known there was a shortcut to get all achievements, I wouldn't have played this for 2 hours. The game just simply isn't fun. The best part of the game is the music, but that won't save it when it comes down to it. The idea is great but it was just executed poorly, a shame really.

SweatShop is an incremental game that puts you in the shoes of a sweatshop owner. The game has a simple premise - you hire workers, produce clothing, and sell them to make money. You can buy upgrades for your workers to increase their efficiency and make even more money. The game is addictive, and it's easy to lose track of time while playing it.

However, the game has received mostly negative reviews from users, and it's not difficult to see why. The game can feel repetitive after a while, and there isn't much variety in the gameplay. The graphics are basic, and the sound effects are minimal. It can feel like a chore to keep playing the game after a while.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend SweatShop unless you're a fan of incremental games and are looking for something new to play. The game is cheap, so if you're curious, you can give it a try. However, if you're looking for a more engaging and fulfilling gaming experience, you may want to look elsewhere.

10/10- really captures the shoddy quality and low price of products made in a sweatshop. The gameplay is also just as tediously unejoyable and repetitive as the name suggests.

I found a bug that when I exit this game while one my walkers are turning,then I play the game and I saw a walker going in a diagonal direction away from the screen so it can't automatically sell shirts,so maybe you can fix that right? And Don't worry I still like the theme of this game.

When I saw this game, I thought it would be a fun little clicker game to waste some time. I expected some humor about (mostly) asian sweatshops combined with a simple click manager. The result was far from it. There are so many different bugs:
-Reset not actually upgrading the hall
-walkers suddenly speeding of screen when loading up a game, being lost in the process
-the price of upgrades resetting because the game doesn't recognise them anymore. This also locks out any full upgrades achievements in there.
-the game closing down for no apparent reason.
and the list goes on.

Besides the bugs there are a couple of other problems it has.
there is almost no information at all. the upgrades tell you nothing about what they actually do. and if you get an error you have no idea what the problem is.

Even the dark humor that I would have enjoyed is no where to be found.

even with the discount it's definitely not worth it.
I recommend everybody to stay away from it. If they fix the bugs etc then maybe you could consider it.

Reasons Not Recommended:
1. Boring
2. Hours of clicking
3. Time-consuming

Reasons Not Completely Bad:
1. Well-made
2. Cheap

Comments:
I got the game super cheap with a coupon from badge making. The only reason it was worth it was that it is an easy perfect game with a cheat you can use in the esc menu. The game starts out slow but gets progressively better, but never really reaching a state that I like.

I mean, by now everyone knows that the game doesn't work properly. I only paid like 20 cents for it when I got it so there wasn't any expectations, let alone ones that were high. Don't get the game, it's glitchy. Though I guess if you want steam achievements/a badge for it then go ahead and pick it up and enter in the "cheat" the developer of the game patched in (rather than fixing the game) to automatically get the achievements if you truly want to. I'm really just leaving this review for a steam badge anyway.

I like this game, really. But currently it's impossible to play it - it's buggy in all possible ways: multiple crashes, broken runners, problem with reset and even progress erasing.

If you like Idle\Incremental genre i would recommend to wait for fixes and only then buy it. For now - not.

Don't buy it, just don't.
It's a waste of time and dollar.

I will say, it's an exapmle of what NOT to do for a game. I've been considering making a game just for shits and giggles. I know python and my friends are interested in making a shitty graphic novel. The question "When should we publish?" came up.
When it's done and functional. Sweatshop is crap. A good starting point if it's a first or second game, but still unworthy of being published.
I suppose the lesson was worth the dollar, but I bought a clicker game.

This game is very buggy. I accidentally pressed "New Game" when I was launching. I feel like there should be another message before executing that command. Something to the effect of, "Are you sure you want to start a new game? All current progress will be lost." I'm not sure what going on with this game, but not only did it crash, Steam crashed too. I haven't had this before. After launching and loading an existing game, I had two of the walkers end up in the same aisle, and no matter how many other walkers I purchased, an empty aisle remained. So I had to manually click all of those shirts to collect them. I had spent all my money before the successful reset, so it was a long road back to $75,000 (the amount required for a 2nd reset.) I was never able to reset a second time. The message on the screen kept saying Error1. There were instances when I had to click other places on the screen before I was permitted to make my purchase. I tried that. I tried reloading the game, and I still counld not get the reset to work. I had the proper amount of money. The button was lit up. This game needs some work. It's definitely not worth a dollar. Like other reviewers mentioned, there are much better free games out there.

Bought this because it was on discount and because is was a casual clicker of which I did not have many at the time. I like to have something going on the side if I am watching a familiar movie. Anyway....after all the negative reviews lately I decided to write my own. Yes this game lacks any kind of instruction, it is trial and error until you get the hang of it at the beginning. I found that frustrating and almost said screw it and closed out the game. However I am now glad I didn't. I have discovered it is actually just what I expected out of a "casual clicker" game. Once you build up your desks and employees the upgrades are important to sucess. Then the walkers are a must and no these are not the walking dead, but handly little guys that collect product for you. The upgrade max, upgrades your finished prodoct stack size, which can become important the more 2nd workers you have at each table because it gives the walkers more time to get there. If your table is full of product your workers just sleep until it is emptied again. I have seen comments about the music, it is 1930s era with no option to turn just the music down so if it bugs you just turn down the in game volume. I usually have a video going when I play casual games like this so I never really hear the sound, but I did listen all the way through the loop a few times. How often do you really hear music styled from so long ago. If you are looking for fast action paced fun look elsewhere, but if you want a casual clicker this one is well worth the small .99 cents if you play longer than 5 minutes.

::TLDR version::
~~~Avoid till game breaking bugs are resolved~~~
---

I am rather sad, on one hand, I like the idea for this clicker. It seemed to be a more dark toned theme for such type of game.

You are to run a sweatshop, make some shirts, control the work environment of your measly peasants as they slave away for your personal profit.

On the other hand, the game is currently broken. Like. All of it.

I don't mean one or two particular things, I really mean all of it. You will be lucky if your save game file survives the night (Hint: It will be devoured.) The most prominent issue with the game, is that when it crashes, it will very likely take the Steam client with it.

Yeah. That is one serious bug there. No other game I have played has ever managed to take Steam out with it when it crashed.

There are also many, many...many minor bugs, as well as serious game breaking bugs, all documented on the forums and other reviews. And not much news on progress of any fixing, which the devs say they are working on. So there may still be hope.

If you like clickers, and are interested in the theme, keep an eye on it, but until these major bugs are dealt with, you may want to pass for now.

I thought to myself "It's a clicker game for only a dollar." but I was wrong.

It starts you out with a minimalistic UI that is not only unintuitive, but open to interpretation, as there is nothing to say what is and what isn't a button or what said buttons do other than a cryptic one word description like 'material' and pricetag--much like being thrown into a job that you know nothing about, but have accepted out of desperation.

Once you grasp the basic concept through trial and error and discover that half of the screen scrolls with your mouse wheel, while the other you have to click and drag, still confused by 'max 5/10' which means seemingly nothing, you ever so slowly inch your way up to 20 workers and begin furiously clicking away. With the imitation of success, you look at your funds, but find that your income doesn't seem to actually increase any faster than when you had one worker. In fact, it might be increasing slower. This accurately reflects the hourly job model where more work does not equal more pay.

"This game makes snails look turbocharged," I joked to my wife who had aged 20 years in the time it took me to purchase sewing machines for 10 of my workers. I wanted to see this game through to the end so I could write a fuller, more complete review, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I may have encompassed the entirety of it though. Tell me if I'm wrong.

I was wrong, this isn't a game, it's an ironic satire on the idea of running a sweatshop wherein you slowly realize that *you're* the underpaid sweatshop worker, and that you are now minus one dollar, and 8 hours. Just like when you spend more on food in a day than you make at your job.

this game is terrible even as a 1 dollar clicker game. First of all the game is buggy as hell. I barely played an hour, if that and already encountered 2 gamebreaking bugs (after the patch where dev claimed he -quote: 'fixed all bugs'-. Secondly, nothing in this game has tooltips. You are buying and upgrading things without knowing what they do. Some upgrades are actually downgrades. I bought expensive sewing machines for some of my guys thinking it would improve their output (again: no tooltips anywhere) but to my surprise they performed WORSE after 'upgrading' them (my non 'upgraded' guy would produce 5 shirts in the time my 'upgraded' guys produce 3). The music is a monotonous short obnoxious loop. Trying to buy new stuff I constantly only get a big [ERROR] message on the screen. Not actually a message that tells my WHY I can't do certain things. There are leaderboards in the game which obviously consists of only hackers (people with 99999999999 scores etc). Overall this game seems like a first project from an amateur scriptkiddie. It seems like a very first early alpha build of something someone put together in 3 days to test their newly learned coding. There are plenty of incremental/clicker games out there which are polished, and free to boot! Refunding now despite it only being a buck out of principle. Avoid this garbage.

4.9/10 - Not Enough To Make Sweat Shops Cool Again...

I received a discount so I decided to check this one out! I wasn't totally disappointed. I don't know why, but I'm embarrassed...I played at least 7 active hours all yesterday. I completed the game the first time in 6 hours, at this time you can 'reset' or ascend to the next factory; which is the exact same except you earn coins faster. I was disappointed in this for sure!

You are responsible for the effective management of a small upstart business. (Sweat shop). You will have to purchase desks, platforms, sewing machines, cloth and workers; this stuff doesn't come cheap either! Aside from adding new equipment and workers your only job is to collect the clothes once the worker is ready. If you wait too long your worker will fall asleep and wait until you collect the clothes.

This game really had some potential for a monotonous clicker but let me down in a couple of areas:

1) When I ascended there wasn't anything new or different; just a coin bonus. I worked extremely hard for 6 hours waiting on a payout that didn't come.

2) Some of the achievements don't work. I maxed out everything in the first ascension so I should have received at least a few more achievements. This immediately made me want to quit playing.

3) The "collectors" bug out and vanish without a trace. These units are so important because they collect cloth automatically. Unfortunately, they start to disappear once you hire more collectors than you have rows of workers. This really sucks when you are trying to auto and take a break from actively clicking.

Overall, I would give thumbs up if these 3 issues were fixed. At this current state I don't recommend, but I did have some fun with it!

Accidently Reviewed

Day one
- Installed the game
- Play the game
- Keep clicking the papers
- Got walkers
- Happy that you don't have to keep your eyes on the game
- Save the game

Second day
- Play the game
- Crashed, screen went white
- Force it to turn off
- Reopen it
- Everything works
- Loading the game
- Found out ALL your walkers are gone!!!
- Which means you have to spend another hour to clicking on the paper

I mean, it is a good game. It is relaxing and hardly need your physical work UNTIL the game crash it and all my walkers were gone. it was a pain to buy the walkers again. Lots of bugs, I won't recommend you guys buy it unless they fix the bugs. Hopefully they will fix the bugs.

Recent SweatShop patch, updated my review

• Still needs a real Tutorial
  
• Hover tooltip telling the player what the upgrades actually do. Overall, show how upgrades actually affect gameplay. Right now there's no information on upgrades.
  
• Music is still within the Sound slider. Music should have a separate slider.
  
• Loading saved games is still bugged. Workers you placed down are no longer there (along with money) but the timer saves (ha?). To top it off it might not even load your save game at all (white loading screen). It appears as if everything resets except the timer.
  
• Steam is still not integrated within the game. It should require that you need Steam running (and not have another SweatShop process running), but you can start as many processes of SweatShop as you want. You can even take SweatShop from the Steam folder and distribute the game to anyone without them paying for it OR need Steam.
  

• Saving now works, barely.
  

I cannot recommend this game until some of these major bugs are addressed.

No updates in two months. Last time they updated, it took two months to only do a couple things to the game and that isn't acceptable. I feel like they aren't going to do much to this game at this point.

Start

Pros

• Steam Achievements and Steam Trading Cards. Makes this an ideal game to farm achievements on for those avid achievement farmers, and you can make a few cents in the market selling SweatShop trading cards or craft badges.
  
• Great Clicker concept: SweatShop - Who would've known to do that? I guess these people.
  
• Not hard to get in to, but it needs an actual tutorial.
  

Cons

• Game is very playable, but what can potentially make it unplayable is loading not working properly.
  
• No "Main Menu" button during gameplay. You have to exit the entire game to go back to the main menu.
  
• No multiple save slots so you don't overwrite existing saves
  
• Loading saved games is still bugged. Workers you placed down are no longer there (along with money) but the timer saves (ha?). To top it off it might not even load your save game at all (white loading screen). It appears as if everything resets except the timer.
  
• No real tutorial. You are prompt with "Tutorial" and then a few objectives on what you do but there's no real tutorial. A tutorial I'm referring to is a system that tells the player how to start, for example: "Click on a square" now an arrow will point to the top right at "Desk" and it will say "Click Desk", "Desks will allow you to place workers on". Lastly, click on your Desk and then click "Worker" on the right, "Workers earn you money." - That's one example of a tutorial that this game should have. A game like this needs an elaborate tutorial in my opinion. That part should've been thought through instead of rushed to release.
  
• You can't achieve some achievements
  
• Music volume is integrated with sound volume so when you turn the music down you'll also turn the sound down. Music should ALWAYS have a different volume slider from game sounds.
  
• No tooltip that shows what upgrades do or any of the right side scroll options do.
  
• Clicking the bonus animal (what is it? A rat?) sometimes works in one click or you have to constantly click to get the bonus or work hard to get it. How does that work exactly? Do you have to click it in a certain spot? Does it have health and you have to click it multiple times to finally get the bonus? Not a big deal but it is confusing.
  

Issues that I see

• The game doesn't have Steam integrated. For example when you try to run two instances of the same game it will tell you, "This app is already running". In this case you can run as many SweatShop processes you want. I just tested without having Steam on and launched the game outside of the Steam directory, it worked. Normally it will error and tell you, you need Steam running, but that's not the case. Since Steam isn't integrated within SweatShop it makes the sale price for this game really pointless. It might as well be free. 1 person can buy the game and distribute it to anybody they want for no cost. You cannot put steam_api.dll in the game folder and expect to have Steam integrated. You have to actually code it.
  
• Your "MONEY" value appears to be an integer and not a double or float like Items you purchase on the right, for example "Desk" price is a double/float value. Not a big issue but it is noticable if you are a programmer.
  
[*] TIME really seems pointless. Is it really for how long you've had the game running for to brag about it if it is a big value? I don't see a point in it and it is a waste of space. If you do keep it use Timespan or some type of real clock value instead of printing out total seconds. The timer doesn't even start when you start playing a new game or saved game either, it starts/ticks once you open the game and have it running.

crashed thrice, constant little bugs like buttons not updating without you clicking stuff to update the information, and a soft lock when i upgraded the amount of table spaces.

does it sound like a fun time?

Even when I look past the remarkable number of bugs in SweatShop, I don't really see anything fresh about this idle clicker. Yeah it's only a buck, but that doesn't excuse anything. Particularly when creating an idle clicker game (because they are fundamentally sooo simple), it is imperative to do something novel that the others don't have. You have to stand out in a saturated market. I suppose the only novel thing about SweatShop is the actual theme, or skin, of the game. Otherwise it's just any other idle clicker.

I'm not going to refund in hopes that the iron out some bugs and maybe things will get better, but I certainly don't recommend the game to friends.

An extremely buggy piece of work. In fact it is so buggy, the game cannot be played as should and it's impossible to obtain more than half of the achievements. After the first game reset, which should upgrade the Hall, the Hall isn't upgraded. Sure, you can make 5 additional Walkers but when scrolling up there's no squares and options to build additional tables, workers, etc. After the reset you're still stuck as is, with a useless income multiplier. Once you have enough funds to initiate the second reset, the game does not allow you to. It just tells you "Error". Restarting the game, whether saved/loaded or not, just results in all Walkers losing all their upgrades, this while they are still running at the upgraded speed.

The UI is geared towards touchscreen, not keyboard and mouse as is most common for desktop systems. The mouse scrollwheel doesn't work half of the time. The game does not remember any settings whatsoever. If you relaunch the game, you'll have to manually set the video and audio options once again yourself. Over and over again. Plus, as mentioned before, restarting the game just removes the Walker upgrades, whether saved/loaded or not.

And what's worst: during the first hour of gameplay, the game managed to hang my PC 3 times. I have no such issue with any other game, ranging from other simple unlicensed Unity-games to AAA-blockbusters. My system is decent and up-to-date. The game's process also does have sufficient security rights.

Highscores, not even an hour after release, the leaderboards were being topped with players having scores in the range of trillions. This is simply not possible and most likely the result of cheating with things provided like CheatEngine (memory/code editing, increased tickspeed, etc). In this day and age there's no excuse anymore for games being subject to such things, especially considering online syncing. Regardless, such scores shouldn't even be accepted to the leaderboards, but no attention is given to that whatsoever making the leaderboards fully useless and meaningless.

All in all, a terrible piece of work. My advise to the programmer: If you have no clue what you're doing, go do something else. It's sad to know Steam has even accepted this release; so much for quality assurance.