Restaurant Empire

I remember playing this ages and ages ago, and I loved it then, so I thought I'd give it a try. Returning to it, however, I found it was absolutely boring. It would have been a lot more fun if there were more choices for layout, menu choices and especially decor.

This is a souped up casual game, much higher quality than any of the web games that it imitates. Best comparison is Pizza Tycoon, with each having their pros and cons. If you liked the micromanagement in Pizza Tycoon, but found all the "mob" stuff off-putting, this might be just the game for you. 1) Building sim: For those people who like to design, tweak, customize, and play with the aesthetic elements of a game.... this is an OK sim. You have three restaurant "styles" (French, Italian, American), and all of the decor has to come from the same region. Within each style, there are a decent variety of options. There are some cute features like being able to adjust the lighting on each table to give some nice effects. 2) Resource control - This is done pretty well. You acquire new and better ingredients and recipes throughout the game through various mechanisms, some story based, some random events, which require decisions about paying cash up front vs. using the cash for other purposes. Since you're pretty cash strapped at the beginning, this is a fairly well developed game mechanism. 3) People management - hiring and firing of employees. Hiring waiters and dishwashers are hostesses is done almost identically to other games of this genre. But the CHEFS!! You will almost always be shorthanded on chefs. You acquire most of them through story related events, and the exceptions are idiots you hire at random and have to train from nothing. But since you're shorthanded... 4) Mid to Late Game - At this point, you've got a routine down, know how to tackle each mission, and can get a restaurant off the ground and profitable without too many problems. Of course, all the other restaurants are still operating. Think of starting a new city in Caesar or Pharoah, only if you had to run all your previous cities simultaneously, moving back and forth between them. This is just tedious and awful, to be honest. Speaking of Pizza Tycoon GOG... I'm still waiting!!

The food side of this game is very well researched and interesting. In particular, the running of the restaurant, like food cost to quality, is quite accurate. As to everything else... the game itself has less than perfect controls, and very little help. Mostly, however, it's the incredibly slow gameplay that drove me mad. It's the kind of game I let play out while I went and watched a TV show, checking in when the show ended every half hour. Likewise, the constant complaints of the food not being good enough versus the food being good but the price too high will probably annoy you to death, while ensuring you never become a chef. If you have the patience, I think you may be able to make something out of it, but if not being able to make the game speed skip forward to the end of the day bothers you, do not under any circumstances play this one.

Well, actually its not a good game at all, but i really had fun. The story is simple (a young chef wants to be the best chef in the world), but I was motivated to progress in the campaign. From time to time you get new recipes, ingredients, styles of restaurants (like steakhouse or italian restaurant) and such stuff. The game itself isnt that hard, its easy to manage and not very difficult. Actually sometimes its boring, because you wait and wait and wait: Once youve setup your restaurant, you're done. But there are some guests, who want to talk to you and get or sell some recipes, ingredients and such stuff, thats kinda nice. Some things are irreproducible, like some complains of some guests because of anything and you have no clue how to solve these problems... Yip, thats it.

I should say I'm no stranger to Enlight Software games, I own full pack of their games on steam and had Restaurant Empire 2 CD till it got scratched and stopped to work, then repurchased RE2 on steam to have that game. Why I had to purchase RE1 if it is worse than RE2? The answer is simple and might help you're Linux user like me. RE2 does not work on Linux (via Proton or wine) and barely can be lauched from Windows 7 (depending on your hardware you might need to replace some files for video renderer in game folder). RE1 on gog does not have this issue and perfectly playable from wine prefix on Linux. Thats one main reason why I purchased it. Now about the game itself. I started to play from RE2 years ago and that game still is my fav for restaurant sim (especially in sandbox mode). RE1 is basically first part of RE2 with worse graphics. If you're after sandbox experience like myself that should be OK to play RE1 instead of RE2. Sure this game has alot of micro management for recipes, chefs and you can even add to its volume by imposing own rules for chefs (for example chef can cook only recipe they know, another chef can cook unknown recipe only if they supervised by chef who mastered that recipe), or by starting game with no money and one small venue (build and demolish at the beginning of the game to deplete your starting cash), or by hiring only cheapest available personnel (chefs only under 20 y.o. so they know almost no recipes). there's many rules you can impose and make your game more fun because its sandbox is where it truly shines by giving you the power to experiment and have fun. I strongly recommend this game to everyone who is into sims and who loves challenges.