Restaurant Empire II

You can't beat eating out at a restaurant. There are many things that make the activity a popular one: the atmosphere, the sights, the smells, the choice of food and drink and the fact that you don't have to wash up afterwards. So, as much fun as there is in eating at a restaurant, surely there must be a whole set of thrills involved with actually running one? Restaurant Empire II lets you do exactly that, allowing you to engage in both the ‘fun' and less interesting aspects of running a virtual eatery.

But wait! That's not enough. Enlight have seen fit to place you (yes, you!) in the shoes of Armand LeBoeuf, a budding young chef who, infuriated at the evil Omnitech Corporation's bullying of smaller establishments into premature closure allowing them to create a monopoly of poor quality dining,  has seen fit to re-open his uncle's old restaurant, ignite a culinary revolution on the streets of Paris (or 'Paree', as the game puts it) and finish the evil corporation once and for all. The story, whilst laying out justification for your monthly objectives, is totally unnecessary for this kind of game, and is told via exceptionally strange methods. The blocky, poorly-rendered cutscenes see the voiceless characters endlessly repeat the same action , whilst throwing out zingers such as "What? And irritate my prostate? Again?"

Once these surreal cinematics are over, you're plunged into a tutorial, which, while meticulous and helpful, does tend to go a bit over the top in terms of detail. It's all well and good learning about all aspects of a game's mechanics, but an hour long tutorial with titbits including 'if you have a newer mouse with a scroll-wheel, you can also spin the wheel forward or back to zoom in and out'? Really? You'll seriously begin to detest the phrase ‘click on the left mouse button to continue' sooner rather than later...

Once that's out the way, it's down to actually playing the game itself, or at least, what could be described as play. Sure, you'll have a restaurant in the sparsely-populated city to call your own, as well as the ability to hire staff and buy and install fixtures and fittings, but the manner in which this is done is awkward, to say the least. The camera control is painkstakingly slow to respond, and the poor framerate makes precise movement impossible. The original Sims perfected this system years ago, so what went wrong here?

If you have the patience to overcome this issue, you can choose recipes, source ingredients and tweak menu prices to your heart's content in the hopes of attracting customers with weird names such as Uguette Roussel, Myrtil Laroux and Jezekael Morel (seriously?) to spend some money in your restaurant. And that's about it. All you do is watch people eat. There is a fast-forward button, but even then, there's little else you could be doing unless an information bulletin appears. Being an actual restaurant manager would be more entertaining: at least then you'd have things like accounts to contend with to pass the time.

As a result of its inexcusably out-of-date graphics, horribly inaccurate camera control, general lack of things to do and overall unfinished feel, Restaurant Empire 2 really doesn't come highly recommended. There are much better titles of this ilk available, all of which are more entertaining with greater ease of access. The £35 it costs to download this would be better suited to going out to an actual restaurant: even if your meal is crap, you'll be glad you're not playing this title.