Weed Shop 2 is a Management game that hands over a small cannabis shop to the player and we must work our way up to own something more than a building the size of a closet. To do this, we must first create our product, aka marijuana in the backroom in order to have something to sell. Just buy a table, some pots, and a couple of seeds to start your career. They will have to be watered from time to time, though you can spend some extra cash to buy a one-time consumable water pump to lessen how soon before they dry out and require your attention once more. There is a boatload of weed seeds to buy that produce different amount of grams once harvested, grow at different rates, and cost differently as well.
Starting off, you only have a few options of what to grow, until you level up and can produce more complex cannabis strains. What you are after are their grams, it doesn’t matter what type of strain it is as they will all be added up and sold at the same price. That’s all well and good, but you need to actually sell what you grow. As you may imagine, not many people are willing to walk into your shabby little drug den looking store for no reason. You need to take to the streets and hand out some samples to earn their interest.
One of the things that will likely turn you off from the get-go is how glitchy the tutorial is. It took me over five times to get through it as it had a tendency to lock up the game each time you tended to deviate from doing precisely what they told you or accidentally misclicking an action icon. That nearly made me call it quits on the title entirely, though luckily it gets much more stable after that abysmal introduction. With how little useful info it gave anyways, it should be skippable as you will still need to read up on some guides on Steam to make sense of many of its mechanics and what they do.
Growing and watering plants, attending customers, and trying to gain recognition on the streets is a lot to tackle. Luckily, it features hotkeys to instantly teleport you to many key locations such as your backroom, the shop counter, and outside. You can handle it all on your own, but it will be quite the juggling act nonetheless. To counter this, you can hire some employees to attend to some of the busy work like dealing with customers or watering your marijuana. They will stick around for an hour of real life time, though do occasionally need some blunts to work at their best capacity.
As handy as the employee system is, it is also one of my biggest gripes with the game. They will require more and more cash every time you level up, leaving very little profit to your income. It is an extremely grind-heavy game already, and due to their insane wages, you are better off doing everything yourself. The slap in the face here is that even hiring the best staff money can buy, they need to frequently get high to function at all. Take the security for example. Unless they are high, they are useless. Sure he will run in and punch a customer that is trying to leave without paying, but he lacks the strength to stop him unless you go out every couple of seconds to give him a blunt. So on top of paying them extreme amounts, they are useless unless you waste some product and time rolling a joint for them as well.
You are better off doing everything yourself for those reasons. To handle customers that try to run out without paying, a good wack with a bat will settle that problem real quick. There are multiple bats to purchase and even a gun that shoots garbage once you get to a certain level and have enough dough to spend. You need to be extremely careful when striking, however. If you hit an innocent customer by accident while chasing the thief, he/she will lose all respect for you and start buying the minimum amount of weed from you again. Each time they return, they will buy a bit more every time, so having to start from scratch can be quite a financial blow. Respect also equates to how much they are willing to pay for your merch, and if they lack any, they will buy it for the exact same price you paid for it, meaning no profits.
There is quite a lot of busy work from manually restocking your merch, buying and replacing growing pots after they break from enough usage, or merely buying then planting the seeds you want to grow one by one. And all for very little profit since the customer’s money spending caps out at $420 total. Everything necessary to run your business costs a ludicrous amount, inflating that issue. To give you a point of reference, this was originally a phone game designed to try to get the player to spend money on micro-transactions as that cesspool of the gaming market tends to do. They removed all forms of purchases for this PC release, though did not rebalance the game to reflect that
I’m aware I am not painting this title in a positive light, but one thing that I can’t deny is that I enjoyed my time with it despite all its flaws. In total, I played for 45 hours and barely managed to get a large sized shop after that long. However, the simple gameplay loop was pretty pleasant. I tapped out due to eventual boredom and did not finish the game, nor did I ever see any aliens or cartel members. Judging from the forums, that seems to be a common glitch. Another frequent glitch that I experienced was that all of the meters that float over an objects or person’s head would disappear, leaving you in the dark on various vital aspects like a plant’s water level or a person’s respect for you. Rebooting the game fixes that issue, but it occurs nearly every time I play it which is seriously annoying.
Things to look out for besides customers ripping you off are thugs, thieves, and Juggalos. Thugs will come in to steal any money that doesn’t fit in your safe’s storage, thieves will steal grams of weed, and Juggalos will steal your merch. They are very common occurrences making you wish that the security staff actually functioned well, since there is a lot of room to accidentally hit a customer in the crossfire. Especially in a packed, tiny store. Juggalos, in particular, will be the vain of your existence. They are like Olympic sprinters and will easily outrun even security you just gave a fat blunt to. If you are slow to react, they will run off with an 8k priced bong or any other merch, none of which are cheap. The game just loves to keep you in a state of barely making any profits.
Another less common threat are drug dealers. These individuals will stand on the street corners selling cheap, low-quality weed and will divert a lot of your traffic. If you see a sudden decrease in customers or a lot of them walking by holding a black bag, it is time to pull out your bat and chase them off. The only enemies that fight back are the Thugs. No matter what type of weapon you have, you can not handle them. You will need to get high yourself to have the ability to defeat them. While high, you will also earn double XP for everything that you do, which is more of a curse than a blessing due to this title’s poor balancing. Sure you earn new objects to buy nearly every time you level up, but it will also introduce new threats and force you to pay your staff higher wages even if you are making the same overall income as the last time you leveled up.
Weed Shop 2 has a ton of content to it. After earning enough levels, you will be able to set up hydro stations to grow unique weed strains, make weed based candy or consumables to sell out on the beach, and purchase a ton of other cool things. Chief among them being a TV in where you can play Youtube videos to have something to view or listen to as you work. Even buying said stuff has its own serious flaw, unfortunately. The menu interface is absolutely terrible. Objects are sorted very strangely, making finding anything a time-consuming chore until you memorize where they are, and even then it requires quite a bit of effort to get everything you want. The thing there is that time will still progress when scrolling through the menus. Customers will need to be served, plants watered, as well as unwanted guests being able to rob you while distracted.
Getting a CCTV camera will at the very least alert you to a known criminal, but then you will have to exit your menu, chase them off, and scroll to where you left off once more. It is incredibly tedious in the case of merch. A customer buys something, then it is up to you to purchase another and manually place it time after time. It’s the same deal with selling weed based food, you need to hire someone to sell it for you, but you are still the one that constantly has to replace everything manually. All of these factors add up, if you were expecting a laid-back game, this is not for you.
It is an interesting thing indeed that it took me 45 hours to tap out and move on to something else. Even more fascinating is that I look back fondly at that time spent. That’s the thing, while a glitchy mess, Weed Shop 2 is a decent game. What ultimately damns it is the absurd balance, designed with micro-transactions in mind, and not bothering to tweak things on its release to PC. This is the type of title you will likely enjoy playing, but will never finish it. With that in mind, I would actually recommend it to those willing to put up with a deeply flawed, yet ultimately enjoyable title, even if you are not too keen on marijuana culture.
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