Coffee Tycoon Review

Intro

A game about coffee?? I’m from Seattle, this game should’ve been right up my alley!

The Story

Ever want to open your own coffee shop? Well, I can’t say that I have but I do love to drink coffee so I decided to give this game a shot. All you have to do is open up a shop and keep hitting the same button over and over and over again, hoping that you get good bonuses that will bring you more customers and profits.

The Good And The Bad

As I said in my intro… I love coffee. If you don’t believe me, ask my girlfriend. She’ll tell you. Anyways, I thought that this game would be a real fun look inside on how to run a coffee shop but very quickly I found that I needed to drink coffee just to get through the game.

At first you are treated to a few options such as what kind of store you want to open, what city you want to open your store in and what the name of your store is going to be. I played through this game a couple of times to test the different variables and really I found little difference in any of these options. Nothing seemed like it was easier or harder when it came to location or style.

The options once you open the store are just as limited. You get to choose a few types of coffee to serve at first and as you gain profits, you can offer more types of coffee and you can also start to offer new upgrades in your store to bring in more customers and different types of advertising as you level up to bring in more money but once you’re done with that, you’re basically done with the store.

From then on all you’re doing is constantly hitting the ‘begin day’ button and watching the little screen on the left hand side to see what kinds of bonuses you’re going to get for the day or what kinds of hazards are going to hit you.

Playing through this game became very tedious very quickly. After awhile I was dying for something new to happen. No matter what I did it never felt like I was making a profit unless a bonus came in and upped my money for the day.

I also really wish that I had been given more choice in how many stores I wanted to open up but I didn’t even get to do that much as every so often I would get a note saying that up to 10 new stores had been opened… I’m the owner of the store, you’d think that I would get some say on if I even wanted these stores to be opened but apparently that’s what I have executives for.

Music

There was some great music in this game when I first started. When I first started the game, there was a very nice jazz soundtrack playing that really led to a coffee house atmosphere that I really enjoyed to go along with the typical sound of a coffeehouse crowd but shortly after I began playing the music just disappeared and stopped. Even when I began a new game, the music did not return and I thought that this was incredibly odd. The very least they could’ve done was made the music loop but nope, it was gone with no intention of returning apparently.

Without the music this boring game just became even more boring with absolutely no sounds to entertain me other than the sound of a crowd in the store.

Overall

Once again, I had high hopes for this game but the repetitive nature and very little control over the direction that your business heads, this game became a chore to play. Nothing that I did felt like it was having any real impact on the game or my business. As long as I remembered to occasionally buy new menu items or upgrades, the business would continue to do fine.

In the beginning you are told that to win the game, you needed to obtain 1 million customers… I couldn’t even imagine how long it would take me to do that and how little I would care by the time I got to that point.