When comparing Adventure Bar Story vs Merchant, the Slant community recommends Merchant for most people. In the question“What are the best Android games with economics-based gameplay?” Merchant is ranked 3rd while Adventure Bar Story is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Merchant is:
The game has a nice retro pixel art style. From the menus to the dungeons or shop there is a very familiar aesthetic to the overall design that would have fit in quite well on consoles in the 80's.
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Pros
Pro Well-balanced mix of entrepreneurial and combat-RPG mechanics
While the dungeon-crawling and recipe-management components of Adventure Bar Story could each get tiresome on their own, alternating between the two keeps both fresh.
Pro Gameplay is balanced without in-app purchases
The premium items available in Adventure Bar Story are most accurately described as optional cheats. The game is not overly difficult or otherwise restricted without them.
Pro Impressive strategic depth
Purchases must be balanced between adventuring gear and cooking supplies. Adventuring is the cheapest way to get ingredients and the only way to advance the story. But adventuring will never provide enough of certain stables (salt, milk, etc.) so you'll need to spend a lot of your cash on them, along with additional kitchen equipment and (optional, but convenient) recipes. You can't just ignore cooking, either -- in addition to being your primary income, character levels are gained only by eating!
Pro Pixel art
The game has a nice retro pixel art style. From the menus to the dungeons or shop there is a very familiar aesthetic to the overall design that would have fit in quite well on consoles in the 80's.
Pro Fun resource management mechanic
The player can sell their loot (gathered from a dungeon) for in game money, to then be spent on needed equipment or can equip their loot to try harder dungeons to get better loot to sell for new equipment. Each action is a gamble and may or may not pay off for the player.
Pro In active development
Merchant is still in a very active development phase, which means there will be plenty of bug fixes and new features and tweaks to the gameplay added.
Pro Dedicated subreddit
Merchant has a dedicated subreddit page where users can discuss the game, strategies and bugs.
Pro Completely free and zero permissions
Merchant is a completely free game that also has zero permissions.
Cons
Con Recipe discovery doesn't always make sense
Trying original recipes is not completely essential, but definitely an important game feature. Sometimes, ingredients go together exactly as you would expect based on other in-game recipes or real-world equivalents. Sometimes, all the things that should work don't.
Con Aesthetically bland
Graphics, sound and dialog are adequate but nothing more.
Con Progression is slow
It takes several hours just to encounter all the core gameplay elements.
Con Current version has both ads and in-app purchases
Con Wait times
There are wait times in the game for both crafting and adventuring. This makes it impossible to sit and play for any length of time and makes the user have to come back to the game often in order to make any significant progress.
Con Lag/delay of action
When pressing buttons in the menus there is a noticeable delay until the requested action actually takes place.