 |
| | Gameplay
Sound
 | | Graphics
Value
 |
| |
| | Publisher: PlayFirst  Genre: Simulation | | | Min OS X: 10.4 CPU: G4 @ 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB Hard Disk: 40 MB Graphics: 800x600 @ 32-bit |
| |
|
Once you're ready to go, you can initiate the day of trading and observe progress. Crows of people will pass through the streets and, you hope, be attracted into your restaurants. A helpful gauge at the bottom of the screen keeps track of your stock of ingredients, so you can see their relative popularity and kick yourself if some run out before the day is over, as that will mean lost sales and unhappy customers. On the other hand, if customers feel particularly happy with you, they leave your restaurant with coins floating over their heads, and clicking on them gets you a further cash reward in the form of a tip.Once the day is over, you'll return to the summary screen to see your progress and find out which customers have bought meals from you. If some customers aren't buying much, and you can afford to spend some money on research, you can buy information on the ingredients they like, and thereafter cater for them specifically with new dishes on your menus. Make enough profit in a district and you'll be able to buy up to two additional restaurants, each of which can have its own selection of up to six unique dishes on the menu. As you reach the requisite number of sales for each type of customer you will be given a reward in the form of cash, free ingredients or new types of advertising, and if you fulfill all your targets before Grub Burger achieves its own goals, you win the district and move up to a new and more difficult challenge. Gameplay: Sweet and sour Once you get into the swing of DinerTown Tycoon, the whole gameplay can be summarized as: check the newspaper; buy ingredients; buy whatever else you can with whatever money's left over; run the day's trading; repeat.In some ways, the mechanics are a bit annoying. Fiddling around with the prices of individual dishes in the hopes that you'll improve your sales is not the most fun activity in the world, it has to be said; especially if you need to alter all your prices at once in order to achieve a Daily Chef Challenge. Quite often, for example, the challenge is to sell a certain number of meals at either premium price or sale price, and the best way of guaranteeing that you do that is to adjust most or all of your prices to be premium- or sale-level as appropriate. But if you have three restaurants with the full complement of six items on the menu of each (as I found I did in Thyme Square), that's eighteen sets of fiddly little up/down adjustment arrows to work through, in combination with the need to experiment to find the point at which the regular price becomes premium- or sale-price for each. And then, on the next day, you'll probably want to adjust all the prices again. Not much fun, that. Then there are the times when there's absolutely no realistic chance that you can possibly meet the Daily Chef Challenge. "Buy a restaurant priced at $2000" when you've got only around $500 in total, and still have to restock your ingredients. "Sell 30 meals in Restaurant A" when you can only afford enough ingredients for a total of 25 meals between all your restaurants. "Sell 15 meals to Customer Type B" when you've only sold five meals to that customer type in the game so far and can't afford to research the customer's favored ingredients, let alone afford the new recipe that uses them. The Daily Chef Challenge is usually achievable (though often uncomfortably expensive), but when it's blatantly impossible it's pretty frustrating, because it translates directly into an advantage for Grub Burger. As for the characters in the game, most of them make sense and it's quite fun to see the familiar images from other Diner Dash games being used in a new setting. But some of them do seem pretty incongruous: notably the cavemen and medieval knights who turn up alongside little old ladies and business execs with mobile phones. When it comes to running the day to see how sales go, that stage works quite nicely. If you find that it goes a bit slowly there's a button to click to make the action happen at double speed (which I personally preferred), and you can see how effective your advertising is, thanks to little icons over the customers' heads. There's a visible tally of how many customers of each type have been served and, most usefully, you can keep an eye on the stock levels of all your ingredients. The one really odd part of this section of the game is the collection of tips. As mentioned above, happy customers wander away with coins over their heads, which produce a tip if clicked. Why? How normal is it for restaurant employees to have to chase their customers halfway across a town to collect a bit of loose change that the customer is happy to donate but unwilling to leave in the restaurant? So the tip-collection exercise struck me as a bit silly. It turns this part of the game into a frantic Whack-a-Mole-style click-fest, and distracts the player from observing useful information such as the changing stock levels. What's more, the bursting-coins animation that's shown when you receive a tip makes it difficult to spot other tip-bearing customers in the area of your click. Luckily, the clicking doesn't have to be very precise, so I found that just clicking repeatedly in the general area of a restaurant caused most tips to be mopped up; but this became less practical when I had two or three restaurants. I guess the game designers wanted to inject a bit of dynamism and excitement into the game, but I don't feel that this was the best way to do it; it would probably have been better simply to make happy customers donate tips automatically. On the subject of money, I just couldn't get over the ridiculously unrealistic prices for the various dishes in the game. Yes, you can adjust the prices yourself, but they start at a default that's midway between sale and premium price, so there's a well-defined range for each item. And within that I have to ask: what customers in their right minds would pay upwards of $100 for a fancy bowl of ice cream?! Or even upwards of $30 for a bowl of soup? I know it's only a game, but really! Yet the DinerTown denizens must not be in their right minds, for at one moment they'll be eagerly splashing out $40 for a risotto, and then, a mere couple of days later, refusing to buy the same dish at a $15 sale price on the grounds that it's too expensive.
|
|
