Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game is a restaurant management game that was released on the 6th December 2018. It is currently only available to play through Steam. The game was developed by Inner Void and published by Digital Tribe. Inner Void Interactive had the goal of creating a game where players could live their own story through their own avatar without compromising the depth of a tycoon game. Digital Tribe strongly believes that each game project they work on needs a customised approach to achieve an optimal result. Over the years, Digital Tribe have done a lot of work with independent game developers.
Your Restaurant, Your Way
Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game allows players to completely customise their experience in restaurant management. You start the game by creating your avatar, and you can choose exactly how you want them to look. From there you can choose between three start-up restaurants. These range from cheapest to most expensive. Next, you will customise the restaurant completely. You can select what appliances to have in your kitchen, what type of tables and chairs you would like and even what kind of decorations you want on the walls.
After you have made your restaurant look the way you want it, you can create your menu. It is important to make sure you have quite a variety of food for your customers. You can also create your own dishes from scratch. Everything that you do will earn you both skill points and ingredient points. You can use the skill points to improve your character’s chances of being a successful chef and business owner. The ingredient points allow you to unlock new ingredients for when you create your own dishes.
Lastly, before opening your restaurant, you will hire your staff. Remember, you will have to pay these people, so you want a staff that is capable but not too expensive. You can also fire them and hire new staff whenever you want. The staff also never leave unless you fire them. That’s right, they are there for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When you have chosen these lucky people, you can open your restaurant.
This Ain’t No Kitchen Nightmares
With Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game, the scoring system for your restaurant comes from your customers. The customers rate your restaurant out of 5 stars and can leave little comments about what they liked or disliked. You will see a rating for 4 parts of their experience, which are Service, Food Quality, Price and Atmosphere. This results in an average rating from that customer. So, if your Food Quality is only 2 or 3 stars, but everything else has got 5 stars, you might get an average of 4 or 4.5 out of 5 stars for that single customer.
The more popular you are, the more likely you are to be offered deals from sponsorship companies. After you have reached a certain amount of stars, you will be contacted by one of these sponsors and be given the opportunity to use different types of furniture and items in your restaurant. As you progress through the game, you will receive notifications of new deals and opportunities that you can accept.
Another part to Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game is the choice of your policies. You can select how clean and tidy you want to keep different parts of your restaurant. This, however, comes at a price. The cleaner you keep your restaurant, the more it will cost you. If you don’t have many funds after building your restaurant and paying your staff, you will have to choose which parts of the restaurant you will have to keep clean and which parts can stay a little dingy since they might not matter as much. Another choice is to chance going bankrupt but keeping the entirety of your restaurant looking pristine.
My Compliments to the Chef
The greatest thing about Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game is the ability to customise absolutely everything. I love the fact that you can create your own menu and that the tycoon element is not just about the building itself. When I create my own recipes in the game, I think about what I would use in real life, and to my surprise, this actually worked. The game is quite realistic when it comes to the ingredients and food.
Another great thing about the game is the characters. They are all completely individual. Some look quite similar, but they all have different qualities. When I was reading some of the customers’ reviews for my restaurant, I was thinking, “Wow, this is really in-depth and detailed.”
At the beginning of the game, you are presented with the instructions of how to play. These are very detailed but are delivered in stages, so it is very easy to follow. The instructions of how to play are also very clear and easy to understand.
You Just Can’t Get the Right Staff These Days
The biggest problem I found with Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game is that it is riddled with glitching issues. There were so many times where my entire staff would get stuck within the walls, the tables or on their way across the restaurant. Because this happens so often, you have to make sure you save your game regularly, which can be a pain. To fix the glitching, you can try firing the member(s) of your staff that are stuck, which is an option, and hiring new staff. If the staff you have are extremely skilled and you don’t want to lose them, you can try leaving the game and loading it up again.
Another issue with Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game is the timing for the restaurant’s busy periods. There are times when you will have a customer turn up at a ridiculous time, like 1AM. A normal restaurant would be busy during the typical times of day, like maybe 12PM to 2PM and 5PM to 9PM or 10PM . Most of the time, the evening customers show up at 8PM or 9PM, and it doesn’t become empty again until midnight.
Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game Overall
Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game allows players to be extremely creative, but the issues that it presents are very frustrating. Everything within the game is customisable, so it feels like you are creating your own completely individual experience. There is a lot of depth and detail with the tycoon side of the game, with a variety of choices to make. The scoring system is great, and I found myself constantly reading the customers’ comments.
The glitching issues within the game are the biggest problem, and although there are ways around the issues, they can affect the rest of the game. There was a time where my entire staff had glitched, and by the time I fixed the issue, all of my customers had gotten so unhappy that they left. Not only did I lose quite a bit of the restaurant’s money, but I also lost my high ranking from the customers’ reviews. I was so bothered by this that I ended up starting the game again.
Developer: Inner Void
Publisher: Digital Tribe
Platform: PC
Release Date: 6th December 2018
