Social Game Reviews

If you are rich and well connected then Café World on Facebook is for you. Why do I say that you ask read on to find out more about it. The idea behind the game is good if you like running a simulated restaurant, which surprisingly I did, but once you start playing the game very soon you start feeling like a stuck wheel. The only way to get unstuck is to either spend money on buying things within the game or go on a recruiting your friends to becomes your neighbors in this world of restaurants.

You start out by becoming the owner of a little café which has the bare essentials for running it, with you being the cook and one amongst your lucky friends becoming the waiter. You create a customized cartoon avatar which represents you in the game, as you start out with very little café coins there are very limited choices that you can make to spruce up your avatar, but you can always come back to it.

You also know a few basic recipes that you can cook using small amounts of café coins for materials that go in the dish. Your restaurant is equipped with a couple of stoves to cook food and a couple of counters on which you serve the food.

Now begins the fun stuff, you cook a dish which basically requires you to click the stove a few times while you perform related task like chopping vegetables, marinating meats etc. and you get experience points (known as café points) for those actions. Each time you successfully create and serve a dish you get more experience points and you get to level up. With each level you learn a few more dishes and sometimes you get to buy either a stove or counter as part of leveling up. The reason I say sometimes as there is no way for you to know beforehand when you get that it just happens. The problem starts when you learn more dishes as each dish has a different time it takes to be cooked some taking as long as three days and some as little as five minutes, so you either end up putting a dish to cook on the stove and stare at it while it cooks or you put it shut the game and come back after three days to pick up and serve the dish.

Now the game becomes more of resource management than a sim, you have plenty of resources that you need to manage optimally, café coins, café cash, café points, time to cook each dish, number of stoves, number of counters (decides how many dishes you can serve at any one time) and finally your café rating. Each of these affect your game play some are under your control like the number of dishes you make and some others you are not directly in control of like the number of counters or stoves they are available as you level up, while there are some which you can do absolutely nothing about like Café cash and number of friends playing the game. Yes you read it right the number of friends who play this game are also a resource and it is in that aspect that I am poor, as of this writing only two out of my 100+ friends play this game and those two also did it just to help me out with this review, maybe it’s just me and I am not friends with the “in” crowd. You do have the options to buy café cash with real money but there is nothing you do in the game that will ever award you any café cash that for me is very annoying. If we were to compare it with an MMO it’s like the maker of the game wants you to pay real world money to get in game currency, agreed this game is available freely and most MMO’s cost you a pretty penny.

This becomes even more important as you play the game and reach higher levels, you cannot expand your restaurant if you don’t have enough number of your friends playing the game or don’t have enough café cash. Leaving my ranting aside it’s a decent game for the platform, at first you even derive fun every time you successfully create a dish or level up but unless you are willing to rope your friends to play or spend some cash the game won’t last long. There are plenty of things to explore once you have friends in the game you can visit their restaurants they can visit yours and sometimes even help each other out. Once you have enough café cash you can buy decorative items and renovate your restaurant to become the toast of the town. If you ever felt like owning a little café and getting appreciated for your culinary skills give this game a try and make sure to get some friends along or else it can turn into a very tedious chore.

Related Links

Cafe World info page
Cafe World Game (starts the game on facebook)
Zynga’s page for Cafe World