Mooshua » Reviews » Espresso Tycoon
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It's not a bad game: It's well polished, no bugs, good graphics, good AI, good animation, good models, good textures. The developers clearly put a lot of effort into this and it shows in every aspect of the final product. The developers even left a thoughtful response to this review, which I recommend going over.

I dislike the game because it's business and customer mechanics are poorly fleshed out.
When you go to a coffee shop, you order your coffee how you like it, and the baristas make it how you like it. Maybe there are a few specialty drinks, but it isn't their whole stinking menu.
What makes a coffee shop good is the beans, their staff, and what they are capable of making.

Espresso Tycoon chooses to boil down these ideas into "social classes", each of which will prefer an exact specific drink and not order anything else. It is your job to create specialty drinks that directly appeal to each of the 8 social classes, or they won't order from your shop. The specialty drinks often involve mayonnaise, copious amounts of syrup and ice cream, and weird calorie/temp/caffeine criteria.

I just don't think it's a good direction. The novelty of creating these beverages wears off after the first two or three, and it just ends up being a repetitive chore. We make our drinks and then we just... sit around and wait. yay.

The game is otherwise very well polished (better than some AAA games I've played recently...) and so I'm very confident future updates will be able to make the gameplay (and especially the end-game) more engaging.
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Developer response:
joanna_dreamwaygames  [developer] Posted: Jun 27, 2023 @ 5:52am
Hello!

Thank you for your feedback!

Thank you also for giving our game a chance.

In real life, we also have specific recipes in cafes, and we order them specifically. Whole chains of cafes have some recipes that they stick to, like the popular Pumpkin Spice Latte which is the same in every coffee shop all around the world.

In games, it is sometimes necessary to simplify certain aspects in order to develop the overall mechanics of the game. This means, in this case, making assumptions about whether customers will buy coffee made by players. We chose to use social groups as a solution, as it has proven successful in many classic games (such as Pizza Connection, which was one of our inspirations). However, I understand your point of view.

Is there anything we could improve to make the game more interesting for you?

Thank you for your time!
1 Comments
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Mooshua Jun 8, 2023 @ 3:58pm 
For your first part: I agree! Specials are a very important part of running a business, I just dislike the choice to make the entire game revolve around them. At first I enjoyed this mechanic, but the coffee designer burns up fast due to overuse. After maybe 10 minutes of using it you don't need to touch it... ever.

Your second point: After thinking some more, I don't think that this is an issue I have with the game. It's not a bad mechanic, I just don't think the interests of each group line up with how i'd expect them to. (And leads to overuse of the designer, too)

To your last point, I believe the core problem with the gameplay is the lack of depth. Once you reach the "end" point in the free-play, you're done. Done expanding, done managing staff, done adding new drinks... it's an idle game at that point.

The early and mid-game is fun! The end game just needs a way to keep you engaged and challenged once your business and customers are built up.

Best of luck.