You're going to wish that you could drink the coffee you're brewing for your customers after playing this game.
It started off rather interesting, even with the game barking out orders at me. "YOU NEED MORE STORES! YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY! LA LA LA! BOW TO ME!" With the money I earned from the baristas that collected it, I bought upgrades... and slowly gained customers... and built more stores... and bought more upgrades...
Because of this initial preview, I decided, "Well, why not buy the game? This seems like a solid piece of work, and if I have to get to one million customers, this will definitely be more than one night of entertainment." So, I shelled out the money to buy the game online (I won't dare repeat the price for fear of being laughed at by fellow gamers), and said, "Great! Now I'm going to see what we really got here!"
I was hoping that, out of surprise, something would be unlocked because I bought the game besides the ability to play it for as long as I liked... but, nah. I wasn't so lucky.
Still, I didn't think it was such a bad buy, and, well, hey, game developers need support too, right? Otherwise, they can't continue to make games.
Boy, do I wish I had gotten farther in that one hour demo. Far enough to see the difficulty suddenly ramp up tremendously.
Once you get past the initial levels, you'll find yourself running into bad luck and problems more and more (or perhaps its just me). And these random events hurt. Badly. Your rival will lower the price of his coffee, leading away hundreds of customers... or fires will break out in many of your stores... or the prices of cups will increase and your cash reserves will go down. And there's hardly a reprieve from these bad events. Almost every day, on some level or another, you'll get bad events, and suddenly, you don't find yourself getting to the next level very fast, or making very much cash at all.
In fact, considering how this was my first time playing through, I thought I was going to have to start over and try something entirely new - this wasn't a sign of a bad game; games, I think, should require you to at least require some bit of strategy.
Perhaps unfortunately for the game, I found a way to break through the problem. Slowly, but steadily, as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned into months, I built up cash reserves to buy cash upgrades that further increased my cash flow. Coffee products increased my flow of customers. And, eventually, after wanting to punch a hole through my monitor due to the Smokestack people annoying me WAY TOO MUCH (man, I wish there was an "illegal operations" guy that I could hire so I could smash their stores open and crack some skulls - that guy was REALLY bothering me), I leveled up... and I used that cash to increase my staying power even more.
This kept me going until about 180,000 customers, past the year two, when I suddenly had an epiphany.
"Why am I wasting my life playing this game?"
It took me hours to get as far as I had, and with the new upgrades open up to me, I thought it would have been even easier, but the penalties cubed themselves at the higher levels. I found myself slipping in customer numbers, store numbers, and cash. I wanted to really hurt the Smokestack people. This absolutely bordered on absurdity. The game wasn't that great. Why was I still playing?
To get my money's worth?
To prove to the game that I was better than it?
The graphics are the best feature to look at in this game, and it's not even great... the sounds are dull and repetitive... the gameplay is fairly straightforward and boring... and I don't possibly see myself wanting to replay this game solely because of its absolutely wonderful value. And the game is highly unoriginal. Really. A Tycoon game. Great.
This game teeters on the line of hard-but-insanely-boring-and-way-too-tedious-to-finish.
Don't buy this game. Don't get it out of a bargain bin. If it's offered free on the internet at a future date, don't download it. I don't even recommend trying out the free hour demo - when you finish, I wager that it'll be an hour of your life that you want back.
I, for one, qualify this game as an utter waste of my time and money.