Latte Stand Tycoon + (2023)

I have been on an incremental and simulation game craze lately. I have been thoroughly enjoying the chill genre with these '2nd monitor' type games. LST+ though, has been a dreadful pickup. There is no 'scaling' in the game. Essentially, the base kit you start with is the most effective way to make money throughout the first 2 hours of the game (this is where I deleted). The upgrades scale in cost, but the sell price never increases. You have no control over the economy. Using higher priced ingredients actually nets you lower profits per sale. So the game becomes this slow, terrible grind of base equipment until presumably you unlock everything. 0/10. Avoid this one.

Oh boy. I really wanted to like this one, but - it explains little. You don't know what the difference is between serving good coffee or just medium coffee, so you can make the same cheap coffee again and again and earn the most profit with the little time spent without any distinctive difference. - first, it is cozy, then it is just time management - customers can get stuck in the tent so you have to close the shop and open it again to start working again - there is not much to do just make the same coffee, buy ingredients, and upgrades. It gets boring really fast.

[i]I really wanted to like it, but it's way too shallow for a management game. I wasn't expecting much, but even with low expectations, it disappointed. The art is kinda cute, but the game has TOO MANY flaws.[/i] [b]Its premise is interesting:[/b] use different ingredients to fulfill the client's coffee requests. For example, a client might request a coffee with 3 caffeine, 2 sweetness, and 4 bitterness. You can mix and match different types of coffee, milk, and spice, all of which have different stats. This is really cool and has potential, but other games have already done it better, like [i]Coffee Talk[/i]. [b]- The UI is awful and obtuse, with no regard for UX.[/b] I could figure most things by playing and inferring - like the weather and the calendar/schedule -, but there were still some things I couldn't understand. Some things don't make sense, like how the [i]"sweetness"[/i] stat is called [i]"cream"[/i] in the shop, but nowhere else. There was no way to open the status window while the shop was open, which felt so awkward. [b]- Mechanics are poorly implemented or explained.[/b] There are too many mechanics that have no real impact on gameplay. Why should I try to make a…

I didn't feel like the game told me enough of what things do and what goals I had. And I still don't really know what the point of leveling up is. I feel like it would have been a bit better if it had an incremental game backbone to it, I didn't see any reason for there not to hire an employee that could make a bit of money per day. The upgrades and shop and home improvements are cute but the prices of them seemed way too high. Having to puzzle out the best ingredient combination to make the most money is a good idea for a recipe/shop management game but the multiple ingredients unlocked really slowly and you always had to bustle back to the shop to restock them. It would have been less of a hassle if the game was able to keep your shop open while you were shopping through an incremental passive income, but it wasn't.

I don't get it. The gameplay loop involves making coffees by mixing ingredients in the perfect ratio of caffeination, sweetness, and bitterness. You can achieve this by either using cheap basic ingredients that increase each parameter by 1 or paying extra to use advanced ingredients that often increase multiple parameters by different values. The problem is, the advanced ingredients are exponentially more expensive and time-consuming to use than the basic ones, which means there's no compelling reason to challenge yourself with complex combinations. In fact, it seems you're not even supposed to aim for a perfect coffee, as the selling price remains the same whether you skimp on ingredients or not. The UI is also cumbersome. There's a number in the top left corner that seems to be your level of some sort, but what does it do? There's another level in the bottom right corner, which appears to increase faster when perfect coffees are made, but again, the game doesn't explain what it is or why you should care. There's a calendar with cryptic icons, and there are monthly goals related to some kind of scoring, but what this score represents is unclear. Overall, the game design feels po…

Decent game, wish it had cloud saves.