Coffee Tycoon Review

At first impression Coffee Tycoon looked very appealing due to the fresh graphics and the graphical similarity to the Starbucks theme. Therefore, as a Tycoon veteran I expected to see much more from the game. Overall I had three main complaints with this title; realism, the lack of operational animations, and the monotonous game play.

Realism:

The fact is that businesses have both expenses and income. Although they try to simulate this in game, I feel that they utterly failed. Even Lemonade Tycoon simulated the cost of supplies and then offset that cost with the income made per sale. There is no reference or user control in this game in regards to how much your supplies cost, how much you charge for coffee, or what supplies are required in order to make specific menu items.

Coffee Tycoon does make reference and give user control over the employees of the business; however I noticed no operational differences to the changes made on the employee roster. If I have a good enough staff to manager ratio then I should not have so many issues with customers getting angry about a lack of toilet paper in the bathroom. Also, there should be some functionality added to the employee roster in regards to cost. If I don’t have many customers, I should be able to reduce employees and maximize profits and in turn use those profits to increase my customer base.

Finally, equipment and menu items needs to play a more intricate part in the day to day operations as it would in the real world. One problem I saw was that I could offer Espresso to my customers even though I was yet to purchase an espresso machine.

Operational Animations:

Although the overall graphics look nice, I believe it was lacking any animations to inform the user that the business is doing well. In the Movie Tycoon you could visualize how the business is doing from the seats that fill up as people watch a movie and then leave. Instead for each day I see the same faces over and over again with little or no movement.

Monotonous Game Play:

The lack of the previous topics results in the lack of interest to excel in the game. I find myself doing little or no changes to how I have the business setup to maximize profits and thus my game play pretty much consists of hitting two buttons; Start Day/End Day. On top of that there is little or no animations to keep me entertained as I click those two buttons.