Restaurant Empire 2
Review
Bring on the food!
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Serving food for peanuts (cntd)
A full restaurant sounds like every owner’s dream, but if you aren’t careful it turns into a nightmare. It can be incredibly hard to please your clientele when it comes to the rate at which you can churn out orders and delivering them to tables. It is not uncommon to see well over a hundred complaints about how fast the food reaches your customers. Other complaints include concerns over food quality, how the staff treats your customers and -of course- your prices.
So while it is true that lowering your prices may cause an increase in traffic to your restaurant, the increased wages may make it hard to make a profit as hiring enough staff to deal with the workload may actually absorb the extra income. It is up to you to find the right mix of chefs, servers and captains to handle the possible strain that your restaurant’s food, pricing and reputation will put on them.
My staff is driving me nuts!
The above paragraphs will give you a good idea of what running a business in Restaurant Empire 2 is all about, even if I haven’t touched on subjects such as owning additional restaurants, different food styles and advertising. But there is more to a game than its gameplay.
In the graphics department, Restaurant Empire 2 is above average compared to its genre peers. A bit more detail would have been welcome and so would more floor and wallpaper options. These are just minor gripes however. More serious are the bugs that kept plaguing me throughout the game. There is nothing more disheartening than seeing your game crash on you after you have spent hours upon hours trying to build up your restaurant.
Pathing is another issue: no matter how spacious your design is, your servers and captains will get in each others way, causing significant delays and thus more waiting time for your customers. Lastly, complaints about the rudeness of your staff are almost impossible to deal with. I have spent 4 hours playing, replacing a receptionist several times a day in the hopes of getting someone who wasn’t generating 30+ complaints about how impolite or rude she was. Raising their morale by offering higher wages had no impact whatsoever. As all your client-side staff suffer from the same issue, it can be a frustrating experience watching the complaints pile up without having any instruments to do something about it. There are other minor issues but none that could be considered showstoppers.
Worth checking out, or nut?
I found rating Restaurant Empire 2 harder than I originally thought. Those of you willing to take the time to discover what the game has to offer will uncover an unsuspected depth that is uncharacteristic for its genre. The campaigns are fun, even if difficult at times, but offer enough to make you want to go back to them and not automatically dive into the sandbox game after you’ve gone through them once.
Would I recommend Restaurant Empire 2? I would, but not without some reservations (pardon the pun). Good business simulations are rare as rain in the Sahara, and this game is certainly a raindrop. Yet the bugs prevent it from being the pleasant spring shower that it could have been.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
