Dealer's Life 2 Review

Have you ever wanted to work at a GAME store and demand ridiculously inexpensive prices to then sell it tenfold? Well, in Dealer's Life 2 (or, how I like to call it, GAME Store Employee Simulator), you can do just that!

The gameplay is rather simple with some systems in place that are meant to deepen the experience. As you launch the game, you can select from 20 characters (10 male and female variants) that have different skills allocated; all of the characters have two selected, and the male and female versions have the same skills.

After choosing a difficulty and launching the game, you are very barely introduced to Bob Rascal; here, the game immediately acknowledges its lack of tutorials and starts you off with "surely, you'll realise when you can interact with things". They were also wrong.

Starting off with $5,000, immediately after your conversation with Bob Rascal and being told what your goal is (reach the Industrial District, whatever that is), you start haggling. From a narrative standpoint, I mildly appreciated the lack of tutorials, as I was forced to learn everything on the spot — if I screwed up, it was accurate to my lack of knowledge.

The game is mostly right about learning what you can and can't interact with, as, while you get accustomed to the gameplay flow, you find out what you have to click and why; the problem is how worthless most of these buttons are. At first, I'd read the text that the customers gave (which consists of "[greeting], I am [name], I came because [buy/sell/pawn]”), checked the item, checked the customer's personality, read the description of the item, and then I would make a very carefully-planned offer. Now that I've spent more time, I skip about half of these steps and instead just go with the flow of the game; this isn't particularly good.

You see, when I first had to think about everything, I enjoyed the game the most. And, although I still do enjoy the gameplay loop, it stopped being so encaptivating once I learned that most of the clickable buttons are useless and that the AI is pretty unrealistic. Nowadays, I look at an item's rarity and state, deduce whether I can repair it for a profit, and then make an outrageous first offer to see right around what price range the customer has. I constantly undercut deals by several thousand dollars, and very few of the customers get impatient with my haphazard offers. That word perfectly encapsulates everything Dealer's Life 2 is — haphazard.

Events happen seemingly at random that can dictate several important factors; it doesn't seem like much really matters. Even hiring employees of "expert" quality nets you characters that still can't tell if an item is fake despite that being their sole purpose. 

Whenever events don't happen at (seemingly) random, then everything seems to be rigged to work in your favour, like the auction house feature, making the game seem far too easy. Once I understood the flow of the game, I was making millions, and in a short few hours, I had almost the most expensive shop.

The frustrating part about it is that Dealer's Life 2 is incredibly fun, but I slowly came to realise that the game's systems and mechanics felt poorly implemented. What was once a game with lively NPCs and funny references turned into me punching criminally high deals into the machine and getting rewarded for it.

Aside from the bartering system that the game has, it felt almost worthless to earn money due to the lack of motives to use it. The only things you can buy are: some house upgrades (from four categories) that do nothing, skills for your character that most employees can cover for, shop upgrades that increase how many customers appear in your shop and with what quality items, and investment. These felt demotivating, as often I’d be able to sell an item for several million dollars and find that there was no real reason for me to have done so, I would just spend those millions to buy more items worth more millions.

Picking up Dealer's Life 2 is certainly worth it — experiencing the game and trying out bartering a bit is very fun — but I can't recommend it outside of a discount, for the game feels pretty lifeless after a couple of hours.