a year ago i wrote a negative comment and tossed this into the abandoned pile... The Epic version kept crashing on me, but I eventually figured out it was a firewall issue (This game and epic have to communicate back and forth and this might be an issue with many other Epic Games i've been having a hard time getting to work, often they want you to sign an EULA or link to your epic account in a browser window i've since discovered) I came back and had a hankering to give it another shot after watching the TV show "The Bear" because thats basically the core premise of this game.

I had fun on the second go, and did appreciate the 20 or so hours i put into it. Still, the game is a bit simplistic and leaves me wanting more.. You can create recipes in a very freeform method, which i both like and dislike: Typically you want to have 'balanced' or 'healthy' recipes which means that you get a meat, a vegetable and a grain together... but as far as how you cook it or whether those ingredients even make sense isn't really relevant. Whether your idea of making 'blueberry lobster burgers with chocolate jalapeno' and able to mark them up to your customers sounds like flaw or feature will shape just what you make of that... I found myself wanting to be creative and make sensible recipes but often found that really its better to just go for the hidden quality 'unlocks' (which means you can create some highly exploitive recipes that share about seven of these!) So its not very satisfying what makes a good recipe 'good' and a bad recipe 'bad' Still, its fun to explore and experiment in this system and tweak your menu and other aspects of the restaurant. In this sense, its not a bad sim... I liked playing it more than Cooking Simulator (has some of the same problems with recipes, as you can get away making pretty ridiculous TikTok monstrosities in that as well)

Most of the time spent is in designing and improving and experimenting with recipes.

Sometimes the games default recipes make sense, but sometimes they don't (and they don't have to). Like many aspects of the game, it fails to communicate how certain things work. I still don't know if 'sweet' is a good thing a meaningless thing or an 'it depends on the customers taste thing' as the game has no way of telegraphing that, really. I still don't really know what perks do or how good some are over others. I don't even know if some perk and negative quality combos (like short fuse, which means other people dislike being around them, and the perk chatterbox which means people feel relaxed around them, cancel each other out or cause more harm than good)

the End of Day reviews are vital for improving your restaurant. Without this the game would be quite unfun to play. I do wish it was a statistics screen you could just look at though. Its really helpful and well made. Why no stats screen?🤨

This inability for the game to telegraph certain things to you is my main criticism of the game, and it exists in other places too... like when you have more than ten employees, its really difficult and tedious figuring out how to maximalize everyone's efforts. The end of the day screen helps you find the laggards, but even then figuring out how to assign the waitstaff to tables in a fairly distributed manner is a real chore.

The game does have some nice UI aspects to it though. being able to copy and paste staff assignments to appliances and tables is pretty nice, as is being able to setup clean zones (you'll never need more than two of those though)

The game has other bugs too like... quite a bit! However, most aren't serious (other than the epic launcher back and forth communication thing) I've had all sorts of things happen: waitstaff just stop moving. Unable to interview applicants. Hired applicants just... disappear as if you didn't hire them. Customers don't order the food they actually want. Being able to build things in ways you shouldn't... fortunately, if these things happen a reload or quitting and restarting of the game USUALLY fixes it.

The game features a very excellent tutorial, and scenario based missions and a sandbox mode.

Between the bugs, the flaws and other aspects of the game, i feel there is a lot of room for improvement. One of those is imo, the way the scenarios work. Basically, you have about 8-10 missions where you must do certain goals and not have certain things happen (never go into debt for example by spending too much too quickly) and basically you have to turn around a failing dirty restaurant, fix it up, then move onto the next dirty rundown joint. After a while this gets a bit old, but the problem is once you actually get everything you need done... there's nothing left to actually do. You also can import all your exported recipes, so as you progress through the end of all scenarios, you've really seen everything there is to see in the game. There aren't technological upgrades or tiers of advancement. All you can do is make a bigger restaurant with more people working in it. And assigning waiters is definitely the most, not fun aspect of this simulation) The game doesn't really have a campaign, and I can't really think of how it could. Figuring out which employee is doing what and who should be doing what else instead is a real Bear. It is in fact, so unpleasant that I preferred to simply stay put at 16 tables and cash in slowly rather than endlessly expand in order to avoid the work that it requires doing. The managerial aspect and work isn't worth the benefits of money, especially when you just need one more objective to complete a scenario!

Still, its not a bad sim its a fun management type game that lets you explore the idea of running a restaurant, and is a pretty decent business simulation as well where you must manage time, cashflow, resources, and personnel, and I really do like games that do this! So, I am curious to try Rise of Industry next (which I also have on Epic) which probably captures the essence of this game's stronger points well.