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!!
