A beautifully elaborated version of the Serve, Cook and Collect genre of games. Diner Dash lovers will absolutely adore Chocolate Tycoon.
The Story
Cocoteenie, an amateur chocolate chef embarks on a quest to save Choco Choco village from the tyrannical King Choco. By improving her skills and equipment one tiny step at a time, Cocoteenie plans to eventually create a masterpiece that will water the very mouth of King Choco and convince him to abandon his evil ways!
Game Play
Gameplay in Chocolate Tycoon is separated into 2 parts, Day and Night. During the day, your chocolate shop opens for business and you are taken to a mini action game where you make and sell your chocolates.
To the right of the screen is a box divided into nine smaller squares. In each, a random ingredient, Cocoa, Milk or Dark chocolate spawns. Tapping on each ingredient adds it into your mixing bowl which you use to make your chocolates. Depending on components of the mixture, either White, Milk or Dark chocolates will be produced.
Each type of chocolate has a special mix that once met, will produce higher quality chocolates of gold. These are then ready to be sold to customers who appear in your shop. Prompt service to a customer will increase chances for a variety of item drops like ‘Time limit’ increase, ‘Customer patience’ modifier or even small presents which you can open for a mystery gift!
Additional equipment are available for purchase using the coins that will be awarded to you after each level ends.You will also need to purchase ingredients for running your business as well as pay taxes at the end of each month.
When night comes, you get to do marketing, customer service, learn new recipes and make investments to further improve sales and the quality of your chocolates. This adds a brilliant edge to the RPG portion of the game as you get to interact with many characters of the village. A customer list which lists a character’s likes and dislikes as well as his/her friendship strength with you is also available.
A unique feature of this game is designing your own chocolate. Not just adding bits and pieces of fruit or nut to your chocolate, which is also available, but actually drawing lines, creating specific shapes and personalizing your very own design. I personally find this really cool.
After creating or buying ready-made designs, you’ll need to learn to make them. The learning process in this game is in fact, another mini-game where you tilt your phone in version directions that your ‘Choki’ (more on Choki below) needs to go. Completing the route within the given time limit successfully commits this design to memory. Using a particular recipe for a length of time increases your skill in making it as indicted by the level of the recipe.
Remember the 3 little creatures under your boxes during Shop hours that swallow your ingredients to product chocolates? Those are Chokies and they hatch from eggs that you obtain as gifts or from mating Chokies.
There are several quality of eggs like the common rotten eggs to rare golden eggs and even rarer special eggs. Each egg has a duration on it indicating the time it takes to hatch into a Choki. Chokies have important abilities that will help you in your game and naturally, the rarer a Choki is, the stronger the ability it has. Chokies can also gain experience and levels which awards several benefits like increasing the speeds at which it produces chocolates.
It is truly impressive how detailed this game is with this many avenues to explore and nurture.
Graphics
Chocolate Tycoon is crafted with an adorable environment and characters that are almost impossible to dislike. Its cartoon art is visually appealing and fits its genre exceeding well. What I especially loved about it was how the 2D buildings and characters were shown as standing cardboard pieces that were left in different rows to give a sense of 3D to the player.
Game interface and User-friendliness
Chocolate Tycoon uses a clean and simple interface which is really easy to use. Tapping on an icon once lights it up and gives it a title while double tapping it executes the command. Showing the name of an icon without actually having to tap it first could be an improvement but there really isn’t anything else I minded about it.
Sound
There are only 2 soundtracks as far as I could tell but they were beautifully crafted to suit the game’s theme and the enormous variety of sound effects had a pretty good impact on the game in my opinion.
Verdict
Chocolate Tycoon adds enormous amounts of content and gameplay to the usual serve, cook and collect action genre. While this is a compulsory addition for a Diner Dash lover, it is also a great place to start for players who have never tried a hand in this genre.
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by Aldric Chang
