As a vegan and sim game fan I usually pass the restaurant sims but deicded to try this one due to it mentioning the possibility of making a vegan restaurant. Unfortunately, it is not as vegan friendly as it sounds like and additionally it does not seem like it is quite in release shape yet.
While you can make a fully vegan menu, you never designate a restaurant as vegan and can't filter ingredients to only show vegan ingredients. Also, there are only nine premade vegan dishes and the tutorial wants you to add ten dishes to the menu, but the custom recipe page is not available from the tutorial (there is also a tutorial tab on the stats page that has some basic info if so you can exit the tutorial and just use that, but they should really add a tenth vegan item).
There are a few bugs, although nothing that seems game breaking as far as I got. You can end up seeing internal names on the orders page if you change a dish during the day when someone already ordered the current version. There is an event each day where you get a few choices and the mouse over hover text shows the impact of each choice; one day this text showed some game internal text rather than useful information. When making a custom recipe it is possible for an ingredient to be added to the dish without appearing on the page, this happened maybe three or four times over a few hours. I don't know if there is another way to get around it but since I was always editing a previously made recipe when it happened I just reloaded the previous recipe again. There are also issues with required equipment, e.g. pie and pastries should require an oven but do not. It also doesn't seem to be possible to change the color of an already placed item, although it seems like you can sell it for full price and get another one in the color you want (not sure if that stays full price over time).
While not strictly a bug, the city view screen where you select a location is way too zoomed in and difficult to navigate, particularly if you are trying to look through the whole town to see where the best location for a particular type of restaruant is. It would be helpful to be able to see the whole town (or at least most of it) and have a selectable filter that would indicate the best locations for a particular type of customer. Also, if you unlock soy milk as an ingredient, you still can't add soy milk as a beverage to the menu (I don't know what determines what beverages are available). Also, waiters will stand evenly spread out over the whole area if they don't have any other task, even if you only have tables in a small part of a larger space.
Also, the custom recipe part has a few issues. The proportion of at least some items is way off. The game thinks my pie would be improved by adding 10g of salt but I just can't do it (these are individual portions (100g of flour) and the salt slider goes up to 20g! It would be better not to have units at all if they aren't reasonable units). Some of the spices like nutmeg I think would kill a person at the higer doses the game allows. Other things are odd, such as soy sauce has a much different effect than salt and maple syrup has a much different effect than sugar and while sometimes they do, often they don't. The game designers seem to think tofu tastes horrible and doesn't go with anything.
There are two main stats for a recipe, flavor and taste. Flavor is "aroma matches" and gives a handy list of what effect each ingredient has, but taste is somehow based on salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and fat; but beyond sugar and fat almost always adding to the flavor unless (sometimes) if in excess it isn't clear what effect changes will have and so designing a good recipe involves a lot of trial and error each time (they say something about balance and proportions being important, but in some cases improving the balance and keeping what seems like reasonable proportions makes the taste stat worse for some reason and adding one ingredient that just changes a particular taste aspect can have a very different effect than adding a different ingredient that just changes that taste stat). It ends up seeming somewhat random what is considered to have good taste (as well as generally needing add a few specific ingredients).
Another thing that reduced my enjoyment of the game is the cleaning policies. While ment to be amusing, having minimally clean toilets cost more than rent in most places seems unreasonable (and the cost is entirely unrelated to number of customers; there are also no restrooms shown in the game).
The overall design of the game seems good and it could be made more complex along the same basic lines in a sequel, but it doesn't seem ready for release yet (although closer than some releases :( ). I haven't decided yet if I want to wait a bit for fixes or get a refund now and consider it again later.
Post edited August 23, 2020 by joveian
