Dreamway Games brings out Espresso Tycoon as their first title.
Espresso Tycoon is the first title under the belt of Dreamway Games. Dreamway Games was founded in 2020 by Piotr Szwach and Wojciech Roszkowiak. The studio is also working on a few other games, such as Ankh Tower and Dreamjob: Programmer, although neither of these has a confirmed release date yet.
The publishers, on the other hand, are incredibly well-known. Playway S.A. was founded in 2011 and has since then produced and released over 100 games that have been sold and/or downloaded worldwide. Titles such as House Flipper, Thief Simulator, and Car Mechanic Simulator are some of their more noteworthy games.
Tycoon games are also known as management simulators, business simulators, or strategic simulators and have been around since 1963 with the release of Intopia and The Sumerian Game, which was a text-based economic simulation game that was released in 1964. Espresso Tycoon isn’t the only coffee-based management simulator, as in 2005, Coffee Tycoon was released.
Espresso Tycoon is supposed to be a relaxing management simulator where you run your own coffee shop or cafe. The game’s campaign features ten chapters, each taking place at a different location and becoming even more difficult as you progress to the next chapters. The storyline is simple. You have won a chance to not only create a unique coffee brand but also to open stores in 10 different cities around the world.
You start off in a park in Cape Town, South Africa, running a small coffee shop from a truck. This introduces you to the first mechanics of the game and a small chunk of the management aspects. Well, it’s great to go for some of the more expensive decorating items as it will allow you to attract more customers. Unfortunately, it’s not something that is recommended, especially when the level has just begun.
Much like many management sims, including city builders, you need to keep an eye on your profits and expenses. However, similar to running a business in real life, you may only have a solid baseline for profit projection in the first or second month of operation. Once you have that stable profit margin, upgrading and hiring more staff becomes less of a risk to your overall profit margin. Even though Espresso Tycoon is forgiving in its own way, the second you hit -500 dollars, it’s game over for you. Or in this case, the dreaded nightmare for any aspiring business owner, bankruptcy.
Espresso Tycoon brings in its own unique mechanic with the ability to create your own brews, while your ingredient list is small and has some questionable ingredients, such as Mayonaise. If you add milk foam or steam milk to the coffee, you can create your own latte art or go with the premade drawings instead. Even though the premade latte art options are classic, for example, a simple leaf shape is used, there really isn’t a lot of variety.
This mechanic is important as different customers have different tastes and will leave the shop if there isn’t anything on the menu for them. There are different types of customers, each with their own needs and wants, but on top of that, you will have to keep an eye on trends to make sure your coffee is perfectly tailored to a specific client and meet the trend requirements. You will get extra money from the client as tips because of this, which is a nice incentive for you.
Each map has its own ups and downs as well; for example – The Siberian map requires you to buy coal to keep the train running. This is added to your expenses, but you don’t really get anything out of it, though it does raise the difficulty and add a unique touch to the game. Much like any management sim, you need to keep an eye on your expenses, and if your expenses are higher than your profit, you’ll start losing money at an alarming rate.
Another mechanic is research. If you want to unlock certain items in both the campaign and sandbox mode, you will have to set aside funds for research. While you can prioritize certain categories for research, you won’t get much of a choice as to what you can unlock, as it’s randomly chosen from the prioritized category. However, you can choose to have everything unlocked already in sandbox mode if you’re feeling a burst of creativity.
Espresso Tycoon has decent graphics and a good layout for each of the cafes. While it would be nice for some of the areas to open up into a larger in-door store, you can at least lay tables outdoors. Unfortunately, the variety and options for different cups and their sizes are rather limited as there are only 3 cup sizes – 100ml, 300ml, and 400ml.
To add salt to a good coffee or the lack of variety, most of the cups only come in two different shapes, which can become a little stale. Much like any management game that deals with food or drinks, there is market advertising and market research. This allows you to figure out trends as well as bring more customers into your store.
Unfortunately, in the campaign, there is one thing players need to be aware of, instead of a character sprite created by an artist, Espresso Tycoon seems to have made use of AI-Generated art for Kim in the campaign. It looks like she’s holding a mug with two handles; one she is holding onto in her left hand, and the other seems to go into nowhere. However, it’s not visible at first in the game, but upon closer inspection, it’s just badly edited out to make it look normal.
The sound engineering in the game is great. If you are in the city areas, the sound of cars, birds, and pedestrians is prominent. And yet when you are away from that, such as on the train, it’s more the sound of the train moving and the many customers walking the train. However, going back to Kim from the campaign, much like the rest of the campaign’s narration.
She is entirely AI voice-acted, which takes away from the experience of the game because she sounds robotic and soulless even though her lines are well-written. If the music gets a little tedious, you can just turn on a jukebox if it is available in the mission you’re busy with since it seems like there is only one track for background music. This can make the game incredibly tedious and monotonous.
Overall, Espresso Tycoon runs like any other management simulator out there, even with it bringing in a more coffee-oriented approach by being able to make your own coffee or latte art. While it has great mechanics and a really great concept that has been reached, the enjoyment of the campaign mode is less than great since the narration falls flat.
