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| | Publisher: PlayFirst  Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | | Min OS X: 10.4 CPU: G4 @ 800 MHz RAM: 128 MB Hard Disk: 28 MB Graphics: 800x600 |
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I volunteered to review Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients for the simple reason that I had very much enjoyed the original Chocolatier. I'm not particularly turned on by trading games in general and I tried out Chocolatier initially just to see what it was like, without expecting to be significantly enraptured. But the game turned out to be far more compelling than I had anticipated, so I was keen to see whether the sequel could recapture its magic and improve on the original.And I'm pleased to say that it does. But to come to that conclusion at the outset is to jump ahead of myself, so let's consider what the game involves. Gameplay: A box of delights Anyone who has played Chocolatier will know exactly what they're up against in the sequel. It is, essentially, the same game all over again, but with a different story and a few new features and refinements. Just like the original game, the story follows the fortunes of Baumeister Confections and its associated families; however, the sequel is set in the early twentieth century, a couple of generations after the original (the first game's youthful Evangeline Baumeister turns up here as an old woman).Nevertheless, the basic objectives remain exactly the same. Starting from your headquarters in San Francisco, you must explore the world and expand your chocolate-making empire. You begin with a single factory and a very limited quantity of chocolate recipes, and you must travel around, buying ingredients, selling chocolates and seeking out new recipes in order to increase your wealth and extend your facilities. You'll eventually be able to buy a further five factories, a handful of shops and a tasting laboratory in which you'll invent new chocolate recipes. For most of the time in 'story mode' you will also be getting regular updates from characters in the game about things that are happening, in terms of both business and personal relationships, and will be receiving tasks to carry out on the characters' behalf. There is also a 'free play' game mode in which you can work on your empire and refine your trading strategies to your heart's content, but for me (and, I suspect, for most other players) it's 'story mode' that holds the greatest appeal, because it keeps things interesting by continually presenting the player with something new. As you explore and expand, the map gradually reveals itself and new locations become available to visit: some secret locations are also revealed within known territory from time to time, and these places have some of the most exotic and expensive ingredients. Once you've sourced something new, you can take a sample to your tasting lab and experiment with all the ingredients you've bought so far, in an attempt to discover a new recipe. Use of the tasting lab is essential to completing the story, and becomes particularly important towards the end of the game. The tasting lab is the most important new feature in Chocolatier 2, though the new game also has many more chocolate recipes and locations to visit than the original. The other significant expansion of the new game is the enhanced mini-games that you need to play when changing recipes in your factories. In the original game, there was just a single, simple 'fire ingredients into containers' game which worked well enough but was very easy. In Chocolatier 2, although the process remains the same, there's now much more variety. For a start, there are now two variants of the game: in one, you fire ingredients from the center of the screen to palettes that are orbiting around your launcher (as before). In the other, you fire from the corner of the screen at zigzagging palettes. More importantly, color-coding is now applied to the ingredients, and you must try to keep similar colors together in order to earn useful bonuses. Particularly when making the more exotic recipes that require up to six ingredients and several different colors, the enhanced mini-game is both far more interesting and much more challenging than before.
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