Written by Thomas Sharpe
During a hot summer, somewhere in Normandy, and in a water
park I was electrocuted by a pinball machine. Amidst rickety flumes and gravel
pathways that pricked your feet, an attendant shrugged this off stating to my
parents that I should have been wearing Wellington boots. Perhaps this was some
sort of Napoleonic call-back; that I was vulnerable without the plastic
namesakes, or perhaps the attendant honestly did not care about health and
safety that much. Either way, I was brought back, like Proust, to this moment
in a quiet corner of France, by Arcade Tycoon.
Nostalgia is the name of the game with this title. It is a
kind-hearted reminiscence of arcades of pop-culture. I have no such memories of
the sort of arcades this game is trying to engage. These are the arcades of
America, with John Hughes and ‘80s stuff. Kids leaning against cabinets and Space
Invaders and those sit-down two-person Pac-Man tables with their
bleary glass. What we get in Arcade Tycoon is this, with the game
structure probably widely received as Theme Hospital, but I was far more
reminded of violent pizzeria simulator Pizza Tycoon.
The game looks good, and obvious love has been poured by the
small team into the cheerful aesthetics that you can populate your arcade. In a
well-structured tutorial, you can get to grips with the basics (placing
cabinets, managing power, hiring staff, upgrades, amenities, and so on) and then
you’re let out into other locations, each with their own challenges. There are
few surprises in the fundamentals; buy some cabinets and manage how much they
cost; place down some vending machines to keep people refreshed; hire some
staff to fix stuff, and a Roomba cleaning robot thing to funnel up trash.
Customers come in, hang out, drop litter, play games, and give you their cash
and feedback on what sucks and what un-sucks. Paint the walls, place up decals
that sort of look like things from famous games, but don’t because copyright
probably. I recommend the skeleton decorations.
This side of Arcade Tycoon is functional and mildly
fun, but sadly, the surrounding management part (i.e., the Tycoon bit),
I felt, was unbalanced and clunky. The user-interface is the first thing that
got on my goat, as it looks the part, but is lacking in clarity and sense. From
the way windows block others to symbols and organisation, it just felt a bit
like an obstacle after a while. Further, there is a system of upgrading and
unlocking new options for developing your arcade. You gain stars as a secondary
currency by accepting and completing challenges that appear on a list, and
these stars can be spent on upgrades. The upside of this is that the challenges
can sometimes be fun and push you to do interesting things with your
arcade. Other times, it requires you to undo your hard work and undermine your
efforts. I can see the crazy appeal of this, and maybe I play far too much of much
more po-faced serious management games, but I just didn’t want to work against
myself to get much needed upgrades.
Despite there being a vast array of assets, the visual style
is busy. Be prepared for your eyes to be bombarded with authentically jarring
art. Personally, I liked it, but I do think there could be a few more types of
customers. Feels like the clone farm sometimes.
I really wanted to like this more than I did, as I believe
it is created from a fun and cheerful place, but the management aspects were
all over the shop. The world, however much it is somewhere I’d like to spend
more time in, reflects little sense back out to me, and so I got little from it
to scratch a fun-casual management game itch.
Overall 5/10
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