Computer Repair Shop Review

Computer Repair Shop, developed and published by Cheesecake Dev, is a 3D simulation focused on repairing computers. It is very similar in nature to this dev’s other games, such as Internet Cafe Simulator, and your goal in it is simple — make as much money as you can. As a fan of work simulators and tycoons who also likes to build and tinker with computers in real life, I was very intrigued by the idea of a computer repair shop simulation game.

There isn’t really a story for the game, and the setting is pretty basic: you live in a small hostel that costs $50 a night, and only a few steps from it, you rent out a space you use for your repair shop. When first getting there, you find there are homeless people living in it, and when you go inside, they start attacking you. After finding a (very violent) way to get rid of them, you need to start cleaning the place, and then you will get your first customer. It’s more than enough for this sort of game, and introducing a plot would make it a lot less enjoyable, as it’ll take away a lot of the freedom present in this game.

The gameplay is too simple at times but a little more complex at others, which is better. Repairing computers is very easy; all you have to do is either replace the bad parts with new ones or just put the bad parts in the machine that automatically fixes them. Viruses are also easily fixed: all you have to do is install an antivirus using the USB drive you already have at the start of the game. It can get boring pretty fast, but there’s a lot more to do than just that. There is the Backroom, in which you get teleported to the Backrooms and have to take pictures of the monsters there for money, which is pretty simple. There’s a Robot Therapy business you can buy, but it’s actually just a club and is mostly passive income. And there’s a club in which you can play Blackjack, which is pretty fun but not any different than just searching online for something like Blackjack Online. You can also infect your customers’ computers with viruses, either giving them something that they’ll have to come back to you to fix or just stealing all their passwords and getting their money. Computer Repair Shop’s gameplay, while having a lot of variety, isn’t very interesting and gets boring pretty fast.

The game is very lacking when it comes to its rewarding, however; it’s hard to find a reason to do anything in the game besides pass the time. You can’t get your own apartment, so you’re always stuck in the hostel you start at. Like in other games of this genre, there’s some automation, but it’s really lacking — you can only get a guard for your shop, a seller, and a computer repairman. There’s a robot arena — a place for which you build your own fighter robot to compete against other robots. But winning it only gets you a date with the girl guarding the arena — after which you just wake up in an alley. You can’t even upgrade your shop or change how it looks; you only earn money for the sake of it. Because of that, the game really suffers from the lack of goals and rewards for playing well and doing what it wants you to do.

Computer Repair Shop doesn’t look very good, but it’s not a huge problem in this kind of game. What is an issue, though, is the optimisation; I have a pretty strong GPU, but every half a minute or so, the game’s framerate just freezes for about three to five seconds. Animations range from okay to terrible, but as with the graphics, they are also not very important in this sort of game. 

There’s some voice acting in the game for things other characters say, but it’s only partial, and most of it is done by AI. Because of that, there is no emotion in the lines, and sentences don’t feel natural at all. The sound effects are nothing more than fine, but they do make the game better and more enjoyable. The music in the game is nice to listen to but nothing really memorable, and Computer Repair Shop is definitely better for it.

There are some things the game did well, but it could definitely be improved by setting some rewards, better goals, fixing the optimisation problems, and making the base gameplay itself better. It can be fun to pass the time in, and the gameplay variety makes this a not-so-bad experience. Most of the very bad things about the experience are only relevant after a few hours, and it’s still possible to enjoy the game.

Overall, Computer Repair Shop is not a great game and has a lot of problems. Nevertheless, it can be pretty fun for people who like working simulators in the first few hours. It’s not a game to be immersed in all, but it’s pretty cheap, costing only £8.50. It’s not something I can wholeheartedly recommend, but it can still be fun for fans of this genre.