Restaurant Empire 2

Rating Everyone Genre role-playing Publisher Enlight External Links

Just about everyone has thought about opening their own restaurant and Restaurant Empire 2 gives you a chance to live the dream.  Although it’s titled like a sequel, it’s really two games in one as the original Restaurant Empire is given a coat of paint and presented as Campaign 1.  In this campaign, you start off in Paris with one restaurant and work your way through as you master French, American, and Italian cuisine and add to your restaurant empire with location after location.  The add-on brings in German cuisine and Munich as an expansion location and it also adds in the ability to open up coffee and dessert shops in addition to full blown restaurants.

If you played the original Restaurant Empire, the first campaign isn’t going to offer anything new for you.  The scenarios are the same and it’s really just a retread.  For those new to the game though, it’s essential to start off at the beginning.  The second campaign assumes you’ve played before and offers very little in the way of help or tutorials.  As you might expect, there’s quite a bit to learn.

The first campaign starts off almost as a straight tutorial and takes quite awhile to get through all of the aspects. You learn how to decorate your restaurant and how to place objects such as new tables.  You also get introduced to the menu system and the recipe book.  It’s not too complex early on as you don’t have too many choices, but eventually managing the recipes becomes a big task.  As you finally get rolling, you also learn how to hire, fire, and manage your staff.

Once you’ve got the interface down it’s time to open the restaurant and see how it goes.  Once the first day starts the game runs almost like a version of The Sims.  Customers will come and go and your staff will interact with them.  You can get details on each customer such as what they ordered, how long they’ve been waiting, and if they have had any complaints.

Dealing with complaints is one of the biggest challenges in the game and it can be frustrating.  It affects your restaurant rating, but in too many cases it didn’t seem like there was any way to make things better.  I got constant complaints about how impolite my receptionist and captain were (it’s Paris, what did they expect?).  I fired and hired several times at all different salary and skill ranges, but it didn’t seem to matter.  Food complaints are easier to deal with as you do have control over the quality of ingredients used and pricing, but those complaints didn’t seem to happen too often.

As each scenario passes, more complexity is added.  The first step is opening your upstairs which involves designing a new dining room layout and adding some equipment to help speed server delivery times.  With continued success you move on to designing and opening new restaurants.  You can specialize in particular cuisines and even target different markets by going after high end gourmet pricing or more affordable dining.  The financial aspect is pretty cool and was really my favorite part of the game.  You know the cost of each dish, but you can control what ingredients to use.  If everything’s the finest, obviously the dish will cost more, but you may also be able to charge more.  But if you’re going after a more affordable menu, you can get away with some lower cost ingredients.  As you progress you get access to more and more ingredients, so it really helps expand the recipe book and gives you a lot of options when building a menu.

Where the game broke down for me was in some of the tediousness.  Going through the tutorials took quite a bit of time in itself, but then every time you have to set up a new restaurant or seating area you go through a fairly cumbersome process.  Then managing the menu can take quite a bit of time also.  Once all that’s done, you open up and kind of sit back and watch as the day progresses.  I was never a huge fan of the Sims games, so maybe this type of game just isn’t up my alley.  The graphics, music, and interface are all very 90’s, but I can get over that if a game is good enough and fun to play.  Unfortunately, this one wasn’t for me.

If you’re big into Sim games and have an itch to learn more about running a restaurant you’ll probably get more enjoyment out of this title than I did.  Unfortunately, despite the subject being something I am interested in and the financial part of the game really being interesting, there just wasn’t enough there in the gameplay to grab me.