Ever wanted to own a business? Become a Mogul? Make your own smoothies? Then you’ve come to the right place. Coffee Tycoon will grant all your wishes, game wise at least! With ease, you can start up your own coffee shop and have it multiply into a corporation that owns hundreds of stores. How easy can that be? Well let me tell you young store owner. Start up is quite simple indeed, you pick a store design, from simple and classic, to racey and sleek. Name it what you like, such as Koffee Lattae. Then pick a starting city like Chicago or New York, and off you go with one store.Back to store design though. There are a number of different store designs that influence the clientele you’ll end up getting. If you pick a swank design, then only the jet setters might frequent the stores. Build a classic design and you’ll have the middle class types be more of a customer base. Remember to balance your store design with the type of customers you wish to bring through the doors. The city you locate in may also influence what type of customer base you end up having. Have a swanky store but start in Chicago and maybe you’ll have a harder time accumulating customers.
Barista are your employees who handle the cash and make the concoctions, while the managers handle bringing in the customers. Executives handle adding more stores to your growing empire. Again you must balance these three just right to make sure you are bringing in money for upgrades, but at the same time not running into the hole. To few Barista and not enough is being collected, or to few managers won’t bring in the customers. Your executives are important as they bring more stores into your fold, but empty stores don’t fuel the business either.
When you start out the only thing you can sell is coffee. As you collect sufficient funds more choices open up to add to the menu. Each choice will cost you for the initial menu, but once bought, all your stores will sell that type of coffee drink. How exotic it is will determine the price to purchase it. Other upgrades include advertising, such as newspapers, magazines, and cable to name a few. These help bring in more customers and more customers bring in more bucks. You can upgrade the company with stock offerings, company takeovers, and buying or selling stocks. Building upgrades include franchises, and a world headquarters among other buildings to purchase. Remember this all costs money and the only way to get the money is more customers. How many more customers to win, you say? One million customers will end the game!
Ok, what can I say about the game itself. Simple yet complex. Simple for a ten year old to play, complex enough to drive your earnings into the red. Simple in that there isn’t a lot to really look at when playing. Most everything is static screens except for the day start and ending sequence, not to mention your customers moving their arms up and down while drinking. The left portion of the screen has the most action with events, good and bad, happening during the start of the day. The day lasts for about a minute and you watch the customer bar creep up till you get your next level, whereupon the next level gives you a higher customer achievement goal and some additional money and stores.
Complex enough to make decisions that affect your earnings and bring in more profits yet making crucial decisions that will bring you ever closer toward that goal of one million customers. Do you forgo those newspaper ads for the cable ads that might reach a circulation of thousands. How about a company takeover? Will that sink or swim your mega corporation? Only you will know as you bring your business to its ultimate goal.
So what about the game and my thoughts about its playability. This is a time waster game in my opinion. It’s something that a eight to thirteen year old might enjoy because it gives a basic into the world of business. For adults, after the first couple of hours, you’ll probably shut it off and play something else because boredom will have set in. There is no multiplayer feature so you can go mano-a-mano with your friend. The screen is simplistic with mostly static information. The music has a lively set but is very repeatable and on the whole it is a game you play for a little bit due to the inaction of the main portion.
was very disappointed that for adults there was very little to keep my attention other then going through the screens and trying to second guess the computer at the higher levels. To much time was spent on screen stats and very little on interaction with the player. My conclusion is that its good for kids bad for adults, or at least this adult who likes more action in his games.
Father of two, now grown children.What are my kind of games? Strategy, RTS, RPG, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and online games such as Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron's Call. Of my dislikes I would say puzzle games such as Myth, FPS type games such as Doom. Also simulation type games, and games that are just plain bad.
My knowledge of the industry mostly evolves around beta testing games, such as Earth & Beyond from EA, Saga of Ryzom, and companies like MSN and Acolade. Self taught web design is another interest I have. Family life is entertaining at times. It also can get weird as well, after you have been married 31 years.
