Crossroads Inn Anniversary Edition

Preface: I never write reviews but this game cause me much misery, I had to write this to warn others. As an avid fan of both fantasy and simulation games, this title looked extremely promising to me. Then I spent the money and attempted to play the campaign. The tutorial and help section are not helpful at all. The developers must have felt that players would magically or intuitively understand what they should be doing instead of actually explaining the gameplay. Micromanagement games should feel somewhat stressful but if the player can't understand how the game mechanics behind the scenes are working or how to correct a poor score at something, there's no fun to be had. For a game designed on building, it was extremely difficult to actually build anything or build it in the way the game expects. When I haven't even unlocked a "food menu," I shouldn't be penalized for not having food available for patrons. The role-playing scenes were perhaps designed to be helpful but pulling you completely from the main focus of management to a poor attempt at role-playing was disorienting and there wasn't an efficient way to get back to the focus after it was interrupted. In addition, there were times when bugs would prevent me from seeing if I could use a skill properly or even build something. Maybe later on in the game, this would be a nice challenge but during a tuturial, it would be far more beneficial for the player to realize how to accomplish the goal in question. Next time, I'll pay more attention to the ratings, reviews and not spend my money on a product that requires far more tinkering and modification to be enjoyable.

I bought this game's "original" edition, and althou it was crashing every 5 minuts i still wanted to love that game so much. Now that there's an Anniversary edition, which promisses bux fixes and several other improvements, the game won't even launch. I hope the developers will focus on finishing the game rather than making expansions.

I love the setting, I love the concept, I just hate everything about the execution. Conceptually, it's not difficult to understand and it makes sense. The issue comes in when you're trying to get into the meat of running the inn. A lot of it is stuck behind this really unfortunate skill tree that is heavily reliant on your fame which is in turn heavily reliant on ensuring you take good care of your guests and they leave happy. This is complicated by the way you go about hiring employees and setting them to work. When you initially hire an employee they can have up to 4 traits and you may or may not know all or none of them. Half the time you'll get some good and bad traits. The issue being that the bad traits usually make the employee unproductive. This can be so bad that it directly impacts running the inn and therefore gating you from additional content and progress. Normally this wouldn't be an issue if you could just fire them and hire a new employee, but you only get maybe 1-3 employees to choose from and almost all of them are not good in some manner. This quickly devolves into a numbers game where you have to throw more employees at a problem to solve it. It creates an overall vicious and annoying cycle while you try to get your employees to function well enough to unlock new things. Couple all that annoyance in design together with random bugs here or there, such as employees getting stuck, items not being able to be deleted, or blank/empty entries in the journal and it just comes crumbling down. Which is an absolute shame as it's such a great concept, I just can't willingly recommend to anyone the asking price of $25 USD as it's just not worth that. Maybe $10 USD on sale, but I'd recommend you go spend that money on another game. This game needs a lot more work and cleanup before it's worth it.

the game had the potential to be one of the best management games but sadly it's very glitchy, you can't finish quests properly and the game stops suddenly while playing so you better save every progress you make . i hope they fix it soon . Not worth the price .

I really wanted to like this game because latley I am feeling the need to play a economic sim and this one even had RPG elements. What could go wrong? Well not everything, but too much. First the good part: I liked the atmosphere and the story (from what I have seen) seemed to be interesting. There is a lot to do and a lot to explore and find out. And this is where we drift into the bad. The game does very little to explain what it wants you to do in the campaign mode. There are objectives and some of them are just nor clear and there is no way to find out what you are supposed to do. The building part, while interesting, is just tedious and not fun. Everyhing has to either has to happen through trail and error or by reading forum entries from other players. The localization in german is half assed and sometimes some text pops up in french for some reason. You can't restart a mission since there are no checkpoints. So you either saved befor you did anything or you are screwed. Some people in you tavern sometimes have Quest markers or other markers ovber their heads but clicking on them only moves them around in the tavern and for some missions. Your employees get stuck in conversations, while smoking or in the environment and most of the patrons complain that your service is lackluster no matter how many people you employed to serve them. I know that this review is a little all over the place but I just thought that I'll write this review since it really frustrated me to play this game after I wanted it to be good so badly. But alas, this is not the game that scratches that itch and also I really didn't enjoy myself.