Of all the games I’ve played over the last 26 years, there’s been a couple that I still load up every now and then for a go. One is Zeus: Master of Olympus, a city-building simulation that was published 8 years ago, and based on Greek mythology. Another is Restaurant Empire, a management simulation centered on – you’ve guessed it – restaurants. A second iteration of the game was just released a week ago.
What do you do in RE2? Well, you buy a plot of land in one of several cities, then go about building a restaurant. You’ll need to deck it out with furniture, lighting, accessories, kitchen equipment, toilets (!) and the like. Then you employ staff; including Captains, Servers, Receptionists, Kitchen Porters – and Chefs too.
Not all chefs are created equally. Each is rated in a certain type of cuisine, so you wouldn’t want a chef specializing in Italian food to be whipping up American burgers and fries. Next, you design your menu by selecting recipes that your chefs can prepare, keeping in mind the equipment each recipe may require, its preparation time, and its ‘rating’. Only when all this prelim stuff is done can you finally open your restaurant for business.
Your involvement doesn’t end there too. The first couple of months of your restaurant’s operation typically will be problematic. With inexperienced staff and chefs, customer complaints will inevitably stream in. Some will complain about high prices, others about the noise level or poor customer service. Most will likely complain about the quality of food.
It’s not all about handling customer complaints too. You can make management decisions to spend money on staff training, advertising, or even engage musicians to perform in the restaurant at selected hours.
Ever so often too, a customer will come into your establishment with a business opportunity in mind. He could be wanting to sell you a unique recipe of his, buy one of your recipes, sell special ingredients to add ‘oomph’ to your most popular recipes, selling a business contact that supplies special furniture or ingredients, or just wanting to seek employment in your restaurant.
Each of your restaurants get rated across a large number of criteria, including ambiance, environment, customer service, the quality of food, and pricing. Depending on the overall number of stars your restaurant gets rated against, you’d also get access to higher levels of external physical decorations you can deck your restaurant with.
The game isn’t very difficult. The initial process of constructing your first restaurant is a lot of fun. When the restaurant opens for business, you’d spend most of your time making tweaks to perfect its operation, and dealing with the numerous special events that’ll occur. When you’ve achieved a steady income stream, you can open up other restaurants and eventually have several running simultaneously across international cities.
I played the first version of the series 6 years ago, so was anticipating this second version. The second game is a marginal improvement over the original, but it can be had for a fairly low price of SGD40.RE2 also includes a ‘remastered’ version of the first game’s main campaign, so at this point there’s no reason to buy the first game anymore.
Ling’s been looking at me with amusement when I’m so totally engrossed cooking up new recipes for my menu.
Now, if only real-life cooking was so easy LOL.:)
The game is quite glitchy. I have no idea how to buy special furniture from special furniture suppliers.
Neither do I LOL. I think I did manage to trigger the special furniture purchasing one time, but can’t remember how to. Random occurrence maybe.
If it’s glitchy, try putting the game on the lowest possible graphic setting. Sometimes if all the graphics are put on low the game performs a heck of a lot faster, it did for me. The mouse movements were no longer choppy, and the game ran a lot faster.