Julie’s Sweets

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Julie’s Sweets is an Arcade-style game released on mobile devices… um… at some point (it’s sometimes hard to tell for mobile games) and ported to PC and Nintendo Switch in 2018. This is a restaurant management game where players have their character darting around their sweets shop to take orders, collect components of those orders, and then pick up after guests.

In terms of presentation, this game really shows its mobile roots with a simple cartoony art style that works well enough for the game, but isn’t distinctive or appealing in any way. At the very least, the game’s soundtrack features some decent relaxed tunes.

However, while the game’s visual presentation coming pretty directly from the mobile platform is one thing, the gameplay is another thing. Simply put, this game is terrible to play using a gamepad. The controls are stiff, awkward, and the cursor to select a location for Julie to scurry to doesn’t move in a logical, reasonable way, making this game a pain to play in docked mode. At the very least in handheld mode the game plays a bit more smoothly thanks to the touchscreen, although here some of what you need to select becomes difficult due to its small size. However, this can at least become something you adjust to, unlike the gamepad controls.

Beyond this major flaw, the gameplay here is… fine. Fairly standard for this genre. The game doesn’t offer anything over similar games like the Cook, Serve, Delicious series, and in fact that game’s management elements offer a level of depth this game simply doesn’t have.

Then there’s the price. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t hold it against free mobile games charging an entry fee to play on Nintendo Switch – this version of the game is ad-free, and the games’ creators have to make their money back somewhere. However, $10 is a bit steep for so shallow a game, especially when it’s best played in portable mode anyway, thus making the reasons to get this game over the mobile version even fewer in number.

In the end, Julie’s Sweets is a substandard port of a fairly typical Arcade-style restaurant management game from mobile platforms. It’s not terrible, but you can do far better, and the quality of this version simply doesn’t justify the price. There are other better options on the Nintendo Switch, go for one of those instead.

tl;dr – Julie’s Sweets is an Arcade-style restaurant management game that declares its mobile roots loud and clear. Unfortunately, the poor gamepad controls and $10 price tag don’t sit well with that, and even without these flaws this is a pretty shallow game and there are better alternatives on the Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

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