Pizza Express is a restaurant simulation game by Onni Interactive and published by Black Shell Media. I went into this expecting not to like it very much; I tend to find these sorts of games hectic in a way that I don’t really enjoy. But it surprised me.
The gist of the story is that Gastone (a cat) has decided to strike out on his own in the world of food service after the failure of his father’s restaurant. Helping him (to some degree) is his snail friend Lucky, who gets your character involved in the operation of the restaurant while Gastone handles the front end. You are a faceless avatar, known only by your name. I decided to name myself “THE NOID” because I was fairly certain that I was going to ruin pizzas left and right. And also, I’m an asshole and get a huge kick from naming a character for an ad campaign/hostage situation.
From there, the game is exactly as you’d expect from a game like this… to some degree. Your job is to make pizzas to order, and to do so, you drag and drop the ingredients, in the general order of dough-> sauce->toppings. That being said, you have to balance your work with the timer that tells you when a customer has clearly had enough of the waiting. You also need to make sure your ingredient tubs remain stocked enough to complete your orders. That’s where the strategy comes in, though; you are paying for all of the ingredients at the beginning of the day, and restocking also costs money (cost of the ingredient based on quantity and quality, as well as the courier). High quality items cost more per unit, and faster couriers cost more depending on the speed they deliver.
You also manage everything about the restaurant. From the number of tables you have, length of your workday, menu (what’s on it as well as how much each pizza costs) and even what form of advertising you use. I found it best early on to sell at a roughly 700-800 profit; honestly, one of the smartest things you can do is make sure that your recipes all start with the same base so as to make the slight downtime you usually get at the beginning of a shift McProfitable, since the fewer items you need to throw on a pizza to get it ready saves you time. Some types of advertising can hurt your customer flow rather than help it, so you need to be careful about that as well.
The game also does an excellent job of introducing you to new mechanics at a pace that makes it easy for them to sink in,provided you are actually reading the tutorials provided in game. And it does force you to up your game, at least initially. The first time you need to go through the kitchen and menu screens, it makes you buy something and add a pizza to the menu to make sure you understand it.
Graphically, the game is very evocative of 8-bit first person RPGs and the like. That may turn off some, but I found them pleasant enough. One thing that isn’t, however, is the typeface used in the game. It’s oddly difficult to read despite its size, and it becomes almost completely unreadable when shrunk down on the table/workday management screens. And speaking of, the translation is quite good, though I’m of the belief that the translator isn’t a native English speaker. Some sentences sound unnatural for being dialogue (Gastone is particularly guilty of this), and there are a small number of errors here and there (including the one time text leaked off the screen; I wish I’d screencapped that, if just for the dev’s sake). Overall, I’d say Lucky’s dialogue is the best translated overall. But that’s just my opinion.
The soundtrack is made up of chiptunes, fitting the visual style of the game. They’re all pretty good overall. I could easily see myself listening to a few outside of the game itself. Though they don’t really worm their way into your brain to sneak up on you when you least expect it; I won’t be humming something from the game while I’m in the shower or doing laundry, I’m afraid.
Overall, Pizza Express is a pretty tight game for its genre. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, after all, and I’d argue that that is an achievement in itself. And you can certainly do worse for $6-7 games.
Pros:
+ Clear visual aesthetic
+ Great soundtrack
+ More fun than it seems
Cons:
– Typeface used is atrocious
– Has a smattering of translation errors
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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