On paper I should love this game, but I'm really being generous with 3 stars as it's probably only worth a 2 right now. From prior reviews I'm gathering the anniversary edition is really just a true fix of the game breaking bugs so that's fine. I think it crashed on me once, but I'm also using stupidly old hardware even by this game's standards. Mainly the problem is there are too many moments when I simply am in the dark. Dogs have stats, but they're not labeled, just 5 bars that are moving around telling me nothing. Employees are always upset, but it's because of things I don't seem to be able to control. I can set prices for everything on the menu and my guest rooms, but for some reason not the rent of the private rooms? The employees never used their staff room and anyway, no furniture was allowed to be placed in it! Ultimately I could never fall into any equilibrium, the way you'd expect from a SimCityX or Civilization, etc. Sure you may run a deficit for a while or a surplus, but usually you know how to find that sweet spot. Here, I just always felt behind the curve, regardless of the actions I took. Expanding the inn costs far too much but not expanding means you'll never have the room for ingredients which you need a lot of to satisfy the patrons which also won't fit, but then you need to expand more for all the staff to handle the patrons. I felt like I was running a 1:1 staff to patron ratio for a while, but I would still get complaints that the room was too small and the wait was too long. Basically, I always found myself saying Yes, this is a Great Idea here, but why is it a) so hard to know what's happening or b) so prohibitively expensive or c) for some reason for the first time NOT under my control even though everything else is, etc. In it's current form, $10.00 is fine. At $25 or more, however, I feel they've pushed the slider too far into the grumpy face zone for this patron.
