Latte Stand Tycoon +

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Latte Stand Tycoon + is a business management Simulation game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players take the role of a pair of sisters coming to a small town to manage and operate a coffee shop after their grandfather passes away.

Despite the game’s rather nice hand-drawn art on Nintendo.com, the game itself looks nothing like this, instead using very low-quality pixel art visuals, backed by repetitive music. There’s nothing here that brings the presentation up to anything more than “acceptable”. In fact, the way the visuals represent the game’s day/night schedule is very odd, making it look like sunset takes place at about noon, and night falls at around 7PM or so.

While you might hope that the gameplay could compensate for this, sadly the gameplay is pretty poorly-made as well. You have a growing number of ingredients to purchase to make the drinks you serve customers, with different ingredients adding different levels of caffeination, sweetness, and bitterness, to appease the tastes of different customers… but all this seems to do is change their responses to what you serve to be more positive, it doesn’t increase the price of the drink or have any sort of tangible effect on how well you do in any way.

You’ll always seem to have customers randomly come one at a time at different points in the day, and it happens so seldom that you’ll be glad for a fast forward button so you’re not spending the entire in-game day waiting around doing nothing.

The game does offer upgrades for your coffee shop itself, as well as the characters’ homes, and while this is supposed to improve your shop’s popularity… again, it’s hard to see much of a change here. All of this is joined by some awkward unintuitive controls, and a lack of any sort of helpful tutorial.

Overall, I was really hoping Latte Stand Tycoon + would provide an enjoyable relaxed Management Simulation operating a coffee shop, but there’s hardly any management at all here, and in fact there’s barely any gameplay that seems to make a difference. Because of this, I can’t recommend this game. The pot’s gone cold.

tl;dr – Latte Stand Tycoon + is a Simulation-style game that has you managing a coffee shop. Unfortunately, you’ll spend most of your time waiting around for customers, and what choices you do get don’t seem to have any measurable effect on the game. Send this bitter cup of joe back, it’s swill not worth drinking.

Grade: D-

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