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Macworld's Game Room has posted a new review of PlayFirst's Chocolatier, a casual title combining arcade action with resource management and a bit of storyline. In the game players must build a chocolate empire by trading for ingredients, maximizing factory production speed in an arcade mini-game, and selling the sweet confections for the best price. The Game Room gave Chocolatier a score of 4 out of 5.

There’s also an arcade game element involved in getting the recipes just right. Each factory contains a machine that produces the chocolates, comprising a rotating housing with slots in it. You need to use your mouse to aim and fire the correct ingredients into the machine in the appropriate proportions. A plain chocolate bar might be one part cacao bean, one part sugar, for example, while a milk chocolate bar requires one part milk as well. When you start making mint chocolate confections or truffles, the recipes get even more elaborate. The more accurately you do this (the machine spins faster and faster as it gets up to production speed), the greater your rate of output.

Some tycoon-game enthusiasts will find this arcade element in Chocolatier to be off-putting—this certainly isn’t consistent with other business-simulation games, but it does break up the gameplay a little bit, and it offers you something different. It’s also quite whimsical, and helps to add a little Charlie and the Chocolate Factory element to the game that I quite enjoyed.

Macworld Game Room: Chocolatier Review

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Chocolatier

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