Restaurant Tycoon Simulator

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Restaurant Tycoon Simulator is an Idle Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024. In this game, players take the role of a restaurant owner… dressed as a chef… whose main interaction in the game besides buying upgrades is delivering food to tables. Yeah, so this definitely seems like a restaurant game designed by someone who has no idea how an actual restaurant works. But I digress.

The presentation in Restaurant Tycoon Simulator is somewhat appealing, using colorful 3D visuals that are simple but look nice enough. Unfortunately, the game’s physics frequently mess things up – the door customers enter through gets stuck on the wall and madly vibrates in place, characters get stuck on each other… this game definitely could have used some polish. These visuals are backed up by an upbeat soundtrack that’s repetitive enough that it gets annoying fairly quickly.

The core gameplay here is decent for an Idle Game. At first you’ll mainly have to wait tables. This is a simple matter of taking one of two food items to the one requested in the speech bubble at the table in question. You can stack seemingly a few dozen food items on your character’s hand, and they only take a brief moment to pop back into the serving area so you can take another, meaning it’s easy enough to stock up so you don’t have to constantly make trips back and forth.

This game is really relaxed about time, too – customers will wait for eternity for their order to arrive, will pay you the same no matter how long you took, and you’ll suffer no ill consequence for making any of them wait, other than being unable to turn their table over. At one point, I deliberately made one customer wait as I served dozens of others, turning over the other tables multiple times over. No change in the poor forgotten customer’s demeanor at all whatsoever until I finally, eventually took pity on him and relented, giving him his order.

Of course, this low challenge level is deliberate, as this is an idle game after all, and the real gameplay kicks in when you start hiring staff to work the tables for you. At this point, you can set the controller down and let the game do the work for you, or you can continue serving the tables, as your character is faster and more effective than the slow, dumb wait staff.

From this point on, you’re in a gameplay loop of just earning cash, then upgrading your restaurant. You can hire more staff, expand your building, add tables, or even add-on additional restaurants connected at the mid-point via a doorway, with each restaurant having its own separate foods and wait staff.

As Idle Games go, this is all well and good, but the problems here are in the execution. The game doesn’t really tell you what any of the upgrades do, you just kinda’ have to figure them out for yourself. What’s more, when you add on new restaurants, you don’t get any say in what they are… and it doesn’t really matter, as they all operate the same and bring in the same amount of income.

What’s more, the problems with a lack of polish extend to the gameplay as well. At one point, I installed a doorman, who you need to hire staff, but the game spawned it so that I was trapped against the wall and needed to exit out and reset the game. Upon doing so, every time I tried to hire new staff, the game would clear everything – staff, money, and customers, and even with this happening I would frequently have to make the purchase multiple times for it to actually go through. What’s more, I would often find myself pushed onto the top of walls or other areas meant to be inaccessible.

In the end, I think Restaurant Tycoon Simulator does manage to get the basics of the genre right, but bungles the details and execution. Half of the fun of a good Idle game is making progression choices, and what few choices you have here are obscured and often make little difference. And this game’s repetition and lack of clear direction ultimately make for a vaguely enjoyable but empty and unsatisfying experience, even for those who like Idle Games.

tl;dr – Restaurant Tycoon Simulator is an Idle Game where players run and grow a restaurant, starting as a server but gradually hiring more help and expanding the business. The core gameplay here is enjoyable, but this game is horribly unpolished, and there’s little in the way of meaningful progression choices. The result is briefly fun but ultimately a disappointing experience.

Grade: C-

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