A nice cup of coffee is always a good way to keep yourself up. With excessive amounts of caffeine, sugar, and natural goodness, coffee is generally accepted as the best choice for most people who usually get themselves in a work cycle. While most statements about coffee, especially ones that are based around espresso, always get in sort of a dilemma on whether it's good for your health or not. However, this time around, you do not have to think about those problems at all because you’ll be selling the coffee to people in Espresso Tycoon, so you do not need to worry about the side effects of having too much coffee.

Espresso Tycoon is basically a not-so-in-depth simulator game about building your own busy coffee shop that specializes in making tasty, on-the-go coffee, just like how fast food chains operate as well. The story is that our protagonist- which is us- just graduated from university with an internship opportunity to learn about ins and outs of business management, keeping that cooperation alive and listening to customer feedback and so forth. The game opens with a very basic tutorial mission, showing barebone requirements to keep your company afloat. These include making your own brand, checking and ordering on stocks, taking care of the customers, choosing the proper price for on the menu, etc.

Once you get a grasp of it, customers start flowing in with thirst, asking for their favorite coffee. From the start you only have two options, and those are already stock coffee types: Americano and espresso. You can add your own creations and add them to your menu, but we will mention it in the later part of the review. According to our opinion, one thing Espresso Tycoon did well is, giving a class to each customer type. These types have preferences and personal reviews of your restaurant, therefore, you can create your own menu that is liked by every individual class that visits your coffee shop. Although a bit cliché, the classes included mirror real-life coffee shop visitors, such as business people, seniors, hipsters, kids, casuals and students. As we mentioned earlier, each class of customer has their own liking when it comes to ordering coffee, and they have a higher chance of ordering something in your menu based on their likes.

On the second mission, you are given a small shop in New York to base your operations in and get a grade for your place. With this mission, we can learn that decorating your own place can get higher payouts from customers. Just like in real life, a store filled with paintings, plants, and exotic furniture draws more people into your store and gives a bigger payout. In this mission, our main goal is to get a guitar and amplifier in order to draw the attention of an indie musician to play live music in our little shop. By earning adequate enough, you can spare some cash for those needed equipment. During the mission, we  also learn how to hire, schedule and train a barista for our shop too. They usually come in by list and their skill levels are indicated from very poor to very good. More experienced ones cost more than ones with low skill level as one would expect. You can, however, train them during work to get orders faster or make better coffee.

Upcoming levels bring more detailed stuff to keep in mind, such as the condition of the furniture, fixing coffee machines, scheduling your employees to their preferred shifts, making your own coffee style and making it available, making “latté art” and many more. It might be a bit cumbersome to take every matter into your hand, but as the game progresses, you can hire more employees to take care of the trash left by customers and mechanical issues. The only personalized part of the game is the way you make your own coffee aforementioned latté art.

When it comes to adding more selections to your menu, you can make your own blends and name them however you like. We are not pretty sure, but you can just make a cup of water and have it available on your menu; the options are completely limitless. Jokes aside, it is not too complicated, and when creating your own blend, with cold brew, espresso or other available types, the game shows you which category of customers it would appeal to on the right side, allowing you to create a certain blend. When you upgrade your coffee machine to a better one, you can start making lattes and obviously, you can choose or create your latte art. You can take things further by adding ice cream toppings to your cold brew and appeal to younger customers too. Funnily enough, these additions also affects the preparation time as well the purchase rate of your coffee. Latté art maker and toppings menu are a nice touch as it adds a more extravagant way to customize, but the tool lacks a bit of precision, so you always end up making the art a bit off from what you initially imagined or place ice creams in a wrong way.

To an honest aspect, the Espresso Tycoon has nothing much extra content when it comes to more detailed mechanics. In the first three missions, you already get a good grasp of what to expect from it and everything is simple enough to keep track of. Even the game actually lets you know when the stocks are getting low or the customers are leaving bad reviews. Once everything gets quite accustomed to you, it's basically a rail shooter where you are looking at your own place, trying to perfect everything out. What we mean is, it will take a short time for you to be the boss of your business and watch it as it grows.

Not to say you will be only stuck with 10 missions only, though. If you have done the mission objectives, you can save and quit and move on to the next mission. When all missions are completed, you can spare time on your own way of building your company. With a little budget, it is possible to build a coffee shop from ground up, nothing too stressful. And even if things get stressful, you can pause the game and sort everything out in this time zone where nothing ever moves. Unfortunately, as it looks like a very promising title to sink your hours in, there are some hiccups with Espresso Tycoon that cannot be passed without mention.

First thing to notice was the generic way the UI was laid, most of the icons on the top are very small and you usually need to squint your eyes to see what’s written on the screen. If there were an option to change the color, font and size of the UI, it’d be easy to get to do stuff. Missions tend to be very short for some reason, even with spare budget and time, you can get the missions done in a jiffy, in other ways, without learning the basics. For example, in a mission where you need to buy a guitar and amp, you do not need to keep the business up for a day or two to save up for them, the amount of cash you already own is enough to buy the items; therefore you can finish the game without even spending time in your own shop.

One thing about Espresso Tycoon that was blatant as day is how generic and ordinary it is. Simulation games are usually simple to get through and understand. It is not 1992 anymore, we do not need a 300-page booklet to understand if the ants in SimAnts started making their own cult. Nowadays, the simulation games are very straightforward and newbie friendly. You can totally get Espresso Tycoon without having prior knowledge about real-life sim games, and you would just do fine when every single simulator game on the market employs the same strategy, that is relying on the same mechanics all the time. If this game was about, let’s say pasta, it would be exactly the same. You would just have a pasta business all around the world, you’d get the best cooking equipment to get a better reputation from customers, have different employees for each section in the kitchen, and even you would make your own types of pasta with sauce art on them too. Sadly it shows how the new generation of simulation games are losing their identity one by one because it is easier to refurbish an idea that already exists in the sea of other simulation games and “cook” it back to be served as a nourishing new idea.

Despite this whole negative thought, I did not come across any bugs nor visual glitches during my playthrough of Espresso Tycoon, which is a big plus considering most of the releases about real-life business handling come with countless amounts of bugs. Although there was this head-scratching moment whether the developers used AI at some point. Espresso Tycoon, just like any other sim game, has a guide on helping you create your business and this character is fully voice-acted or so we thought. You see, the way they would read the prompts was quite off, the emphasis on the words wasn’t exactly what I thought either. So I assume they used some sort of an AI voice to get the voice acting part done.

All in all, Espresso Tycoon is an “okay” game. It does not bring anything new to the table with its gameplay nor its story, but it is rather addictive with its simplicity. It is a very basic simulator that you can get involved in without tiring yourself too much, which is not bad, honestly. With its $18 price, it can give you countless hours of coffee making and selling while giving your personal touch.

Atilla Turan
Editor, NoobFeed