A good cup of coffee is always a good way to keep you on your toes. With its excessive amount of caffeine, sugar, and natural goodness, coffee is generally considered the best choice for most people who usually get caught up in the work cycle. While most of the claims about coffee, especially those that are based on espresso, always fall into some dilemma whether it is good for health or not. However, this time, you don’t have to think about these issues at all because you will be selling coffee to people in Espresso Tycoonso you don’t have to worry about the side effects of drinking too much coffee.
Espresso Tycoon is basically a not-so-in-depth simulation game about building your own busy coffee shop that specializes in making tasty coffee to go, just like a rapid food chain operates. The plot is that our hero — that is, us — has just graduated from college with the opportunity to do an internship to learn the ins and outs of running a business, keeping that partnership alive and listening to customer feedback, etc. The game starts with a very basic tutorial mission, showing you the basic requirements to keep your business afloat. These include creating your own brand, checking and ordering inventory, taking care of customers, choosing the right price on the menu, etc.
Once you get the hang of it, customers will start pouring in thirsty, asking for their favorite coffee. Right off the bat, you only have two options, and those are the standard types of coffee: Americano and espresso. You can add your own creations and add them to the menu, but we’ll mention that later in the review. In our opinion, one thing Espresso Tycoon It worked well to give a class to each type of customer. These types have preferences and personal reviews of your restaurant, so you can create your own menu that will appeal to each class that visits your cafe. Although a bit cliché, the classes included real people who visit cafes, such as business people, seniors, hipsters, kids, casuals, and students. As we mentioned earlier, each class of customer has their own preferences when it comes to ordering coffee, and they are more likely to order something from your menu based on their preferences.
In the second mission, you are given a compact shop in Novel York City where you can set up your business and get your place rated. In this mission, we can learn that decorating your own place can bring higher payouts from customers. Just like in real life, a shop filled with paintings, plants, and exotic furniture attracts more people to the shop and gives higher payouts. In this mission, our main goal is to get a guitar and an amplifier to attract the attention of an independent musician who will play live music in our compact shop. By earning enough, you can save some cash for the necessary equipment. During the mission, we also learn how to hire, schedule, and train a barista for our shop. They usually come from a list, and their skill level is marked from very indigent to very good. More experienced ones cost more than those with a low skill level, as you would expect. However, you can train them on the job to get orders faster or make better coffee.
The next levels bring more specific things to remember, like furniture maintenance, coffee machine repairs, scheduling preferred shifts for employees, making your own coffee and serving it, creating “latté art,” and more. It can be a bit of a chore to take care of everything, but as you progress through the game, you can hire more employees to deal with customer trash and mechanical issues. The only personalized part of the game is how you make your own coffee, the aforementioned latté art.
Honestly, Espresso Tycoon there isn’t much extra content in terms of more detailed mechanics. Within the first three missions, you already have a good idea of what to expect, and everything is uncomplicated enough to follow. The game even actually tells you when stocks are low or customers are leaving bad reviews. Once everything settles in, it’s basically a rail shooter where you’re looking at your own place, trying to perfect everything. What we mean is that it’ll take you a while to become the boss of your business and watch it grow.
I’m not saying you’ll only be stuck with 10 missions. If you’ve completed the mission objectives, you can save and exit and then move on to the next mission. Once all the missions are complete, you can spend your time building your business in your own way. With a compact budget, it’s possible to build a coffee shop from scratch, nothing too stressful. And even if things get stressful, you can pause the game and sort everything out in that time zone where nothing moves. Unfortunately, while this looks like a very promising title to spend hours in, there are some issues with Espresso Tycoon what cannot be forgotten.
One thing about Espresso Tycoon it was obvious how generic and ordinary it is. Simulation games are usually basic to understand and understand. It’s not 1992 anymore, we don’t need a 300 page booklet to understand if the ants in SimAnts started to create their own cult. Nowadays, simulation games are very uncomplicated and affable to newbies. You can totally get Espresso Tycoon without any prior knowledge of real life simulation games, and you would simply get by if every simulation game on the market used the same strategy, i.e. relied on the same mechanics all the time. If this game was about, say, pasta, it would be exactly the same. You would simply have a pasta business all over the world, you would get the best cooking equipment to get a better reputation among customers, you would have different employees for each section of the kitchen, and you would even make your own types of pasta with sauce graphics on them. Unfortunately, this shows how the recent generation of simulation games are losing their identity one by one, as it becomes easier to renew an idea that already exists in a sea of other simulation games and “refresh” it to become a worthwhile recent idea.
Despite all this negativity, I did not encounter any bugs or visual glitches during gameplay. Espresso Tycoonwhich is a huge plus considering most releases about handling business in real life contain countless bugs. Although there was this moment of puzzlement whether the creators used AI at some point. Espresso Tycoonjust like any other simulation game, it has a guide to aid you create your business and this character is fully voiced, or so we thought. You see, the way they read the prompts was quite strange, the emphasis on the words was also not exactly what I thought. So I assume they used some kind of AI voice to do some of the voice acting.
In fact, Espresso Tycoon is an “okay” game. It doesn’t really add anything recent to the game or its story, but it’s quite engaging in its simplicity. It’s a very basic simulator that you can get into without getting too tired, which honestly isn’t a bad thing. For the price of $18, it can provide you with endless hours of making and selling coffee while giving it a personal touch.
Atilla Turan
Editor, NoobFeed
