Restaurant Empire

Trevor Chan is best known for the Seven Kingdoms and Capitalism series, and you might be surprised to see his name on Restaurant Empire, something a little more benign than his games of conquest and business domination. But his fingerprints are all over this game: superb detail and thoughtful, smooth gameplay. Oh yeah, and domination plays a part too.

Yep, it's basically a business God Game, but you will be controlling a string of restaurants. Thankfully, you will begin gradually with one restaurant, which will be plenty to start because you've got a lot to learn. There's a design element: you've got to place tables so the customers have a place to sit and your staff can get to everything easily. You decorate your place with furnishings and wall coverings so that people don't feel like they're eating in a warehouse. You've got to hire staff like servers, cooks, hostesses, and people to wash the dishes. You've got to equip the restaurant with essential tools such as ovens, food processors and microwaves to prepare the different dishes. You've got to put together a menu of tasty and reasonably priced meals to entice customers in off the streets. If that's not working, maybe you should place an ad in the paper to get the word out. And, the bottom line of course: you've got to run a profitable restaurant.

There are two modes to the game: Campaign, which has 18 story-based missions in which you play a young chef trying to resurrect your Uncle's restaurant and build a chain strong enough to take on OmniFoods, a faceless corporation that has been dominating the culinary scene and squashing the competition (I am going to recycle my "operating systems" joke from my King of Route 66 review here). The game gradually unveils its complexity, having you start with the basics of placing furniture in the restaurant, presenting a menu, and hiring staff. From there, there are plenty of details to follow. You've got to balance the price of your meals versus the quality of ingredients, versus the customer's perception. For example, you can't make meals with three star ingredients and sell them for next to nothing, or you'll take a loss. You also can't fill your restaurants with expensive, fancy furnishings and then serve truck stop-level chow, or the customers won't come in.

You will be given specific goals, usually to serve X number of customers, make X amount of money with a time limit of a few months. The game has no shortage of reports to give you feedback on how well you're doing: you can view customer complaints to find out what dishes your patrons think suck or are overpriced; you can find out which staff members have been rude to the customers; and other areas where your restaurant is weak--slow service, etc. My favorite report is on the goals screen, which not only tells you what goals you've met or have outstanding, it also tells you if you are projected to complete the goal. For example, if you're on track to make a certain amount of money before time runs out if your current situation remains constant. That doesn't mean it will remain constant though. Expenses or a drop in customers could change thing radically. But it's a very useful feature that should become standard in these sorts of games.

The game also has a Sandbox mode, where you can build your restaurant any way you choose, your only goal is to just not run out of money. When the game gets going, Restaurant Empire feels a bit like The Sims. You even place furniture and listen to periodic mumbling from the folks in your restaurant. It's decent graphically, though not too demanding on your hardware (Pentium III 500MHz or higher, 3D video card and 128MB of RAM). The 3D engine allows you to zoom in and out and rotate the camera, so you can get a pretty good look at what the kids are up to. You can see dishes on tables, chefs toiling over a hot stove, and patrons sitting on the toilet in the restrooms (no blurring is necessary). Sounds are pretty good, from the clanking of dishes to the mumble of the patrons.

And just when you think you've got it all, the game gives you more to do, such as train staff and enter your chefs into cooking contests where they can win prestige and fame for your restaurant, and maybe even learn new recipes. You'll need to establish relationships with food distributors to get new, high quality ingredients. Eventually you'll find yourself controlling multiple restaurants with multiple floors and expanding into new markets. You start with hoity-toity French cuisine, but you will eventually move on to Italian and "American" foods, such as Steakhouses and a Hard Rock Caf�-style establishment. I find it a little strange that you start with French cuisine, since it's a lot easier to serve the general public steaks than it is to serve the culinary snob crowd duck and mussels, but oh well. I would like to have seen more restaurant styles and artwork, especially for the cuisine types introduced later in the game.

There is not a lot to burn Restaurant Empire for. (Game) Menus do tend to take up a fair bit of the screen, but you can move them around fortunately.

There is no multiplayer mode, which might sound like overboard for the game, but I think it could work. You could put two restaurants side by side and have players compete for their customers.

Something else potential players should be aware of, though strictly not a fault, is that realistically you will have to play around with nearly every detail of the game at some point. There are several Sim/Theme/Tycoon games that allow more casual players to place objects and make decisions without a lot of fine-tuning, and will allow you to succeed in the game even if you don't explore every menu (that is, game feature menu). In Restaurant Empire you pretty much have to look at it all sooner or later.

Thankfully, I think the campaign sets a pretty reasonable curve so that even people who aren't used to micromanagement will get the hang of it. In fact, for all the detail the game presents, I never felt overwhelmed or totally clueless as to what to do. The game is complex and challenging, but never far from a plan of action to get you out of the hole.

In the end, the word of the day is "detail." Restaurant Empire has it to spare, incorporating design, bean-counting, empire-building, and plenty of customization into its gameplay. And yet, it's not that tricky to learn. So, it's another stellar job from Trevor Chan and the crew. I would also like to thank Enlight for confirming a suspicion of mine. See, I used to work at a restaurant in a low-paying gruntwork position. But I always believed I could run a better restaurant than some of the apes in management, and now I know for sure. So George, Roberto, if you're somehow reading this, neener-neener-neener.

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