Facebook Restaurant City Review

Is Restaurant City the greatest thing since sliced bread? Or just another lame imitation of the Sims? This review will inform you about Restaurant City, and let you make that decision!

This Review of Restaurant City can be broken down into two main parts.

The first section of the review is background information on the game, and a brief explanation of what the goals are within Restaurant City. It explains what information is important, and a overview of how Restaurant City works.

The second section, is the actual Review of Restaurant City. We graded Restaurant City upon three different aspects, Gameplay, Graphics, and Multiplayer Cooperation. Restaurant City did exceptionally well. Read more below in our Review section for more information.

Restaurant City allows a player, to run and decorate their own restaurant. Customers walk into the restaurant and its your job to make them happy by the time they leave. They tend to be needy, and they want many different things. Fast service, good food, drinks, restrooms, seats to wait in when your place gets super busy, are all things they are going to complain about if they don't get them.

Being a passive game, Restaurant City runs well in the background on a computer (turn the graphics down if need be) while a user does something else, like writing Hub Pages. Not for a extreme gamer, but for everyone looking for a easy and fun game to play around with, it works well.

There are many different things to keep track of in Restaurant City, but for now we will concentrate on Money, Experience, and Popularity. (There is also PF cash, but that isn't something you can easily earn through the game its self, so we are leaving it out for right now)

As stated above, your Restaurant has a popularity number. As you satisfy more customers and they tell their friends, your popularity number goes up. The opposite is true goes if customers walk out of your restaurant upset, your popularity will fall. Both of these outcomes affect your overall popularity number, shown in the top right of the screen. 50 is the maximum currently. The higher your popularity, the more people who will want to come to your restaurant. More and more people will come as you keeping satisfying them. Once your restaurant is overfilled, or you cannot possibly serve everyone, they will walk out of your restaurant unhappy which will bring your popularity number to an equilibrium. This is fine, as your restaurant grows, your equilibrium popularity number will grow.

The next item to keep track of in Restaurant City is money. Customers pay money for their food. Restaurant City only keeps track of your profit on meals, which is 2 dollars a meal. This is what you use to buy decorations with, including more stoves, and tables to serve people with. Keeping your customers coming into the restaurant is the best way to earn money, but there are a few other tricks. Clicking on the trees around your restaurant will sometimes yield a coin or two, as well as clicking upon any spilled food lying on the floor. You can also visit your neighbors' restaurants, and clean up their floors as well. Yes, you do get paid for cleaning their floors.

You also get experience for serving people in your restaurant. Once you fill up the experience bar at the top of the page, you will go up a level, which will unlock several different things for a player in Restaurant City. These upgrades can be, more workers, a larger restaurant, and a plot of land to grow ingredients from. A complete list of upgrades is available in the FAQ portion of the Playfish, Restaurant City forum, linked at the bottom of this review.

Within Restaurant City, one of your main tasks is to serve your customers food. As expected, there are many different choices of dishes you can serve. But selecting a dish is not as simple as it might look. When you start off in Restaurant City, you only offer the most basic dishes. Upgrading and swapping out dishes for more exotic ones requires lots of ingredients.

Within Restaurant City, a player receives an ingredient each day that they log on. They also receive a food quiz in the mail each day which allows a player to answer a question, and if they get it right, another ingredient. These are the primary ways to get new ingredients. Players also can trade ingredients with one another, through locked and unlocked ingredients. Unlocked ingredients, are ingredients that you do not care about, and are willing to trade for anything. As long as the rarity of the good is equal or in your favor, a trade will be processed if another player offers you something for it. Locked ingredients require both players to authenticate the trade, and is a more common way to trade ingredients. A player may also purchase ingredients. They can spend their cash on the ingredient market, which offers several ingredients each day, or they can buy a seed for 2000 dollars, which will allow them to grow a plant, in their garden. The garden is located to the right of the restaurant

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Gardening in Restaurant City is tough and takes some diligence. In order to get your seed to grow, you have to click several times on the plot of land, to water it. Each click gets you three hours of "watered" time. You can build up 9 hours of "watered" time, at one time. This means a user should log in to Restaurant City at least every 10-12 hours or so, if not more frequently, to keep the crops watered.

While it may sound cool to have the most exotic dishes, and rarest ingredients within them, that may not be the best strategy for your restaurant. Each dish that you select from, you have to invest ingredients into to unlock, then to upgrade it takes another set of the same ingredients. For each level that your dish is at, you gain more experience when someone orders and eats it. Experience rises slowly, (I think by .2 for each level) so this may not seem like a huge deal when you are first starting off. But when your restaurant becomes busy and hundreds of customers and passing through hourly, this really adds up fast.

Another thing to keep in mind while playing Restaurant City is that while you have a way to earn more experience from each dish, your level of cash you earn stays very steady. This creates a disparity in the beginning of the game, if your dishes are upgraded, but you don't have enough money to get more tables and chairs. Your restaurant may grow faster than you can decorate it. Not to worry however, as you get more tables, your restaurant will get more people, which will then eventually bring in enough money to catch back up.

Navigating through Restaurant City is very simple, due to menu bar shown above.

The first icon takes you to your Street, where you can view your friends' restaurants.

The second icon is your Redecorate icon, where you pick your furniture, as well as wallpaper, and other things to make your restaurant unique.

The third icon is the Decorate Yourself icon, which takes you to where you can decorate yourself. This is a more complex version than the decorating employee windows, because you get to change your facial features, skin tone, hair style and color, and add features to your actual character.

The next icon is the Change Menu icon. You choose what dishes to serve in your restaurant here. This is where you go to use up ingredients, and upgrade your dishes as well.

The envelope icon is the Mail icon. This is where a user checks for mail from Play Fish about Restaurant City, as well as letters from friends, and daily food quizzes. Trade requests for locked items are stored here as well.

The icon with a trophy on it is your Awards icon. This is where you can view what awards you have received from playing Restaurant City, and what ones are still awaiting you.

The red suitcase icon is the Send Food To a Friend, which allows you to send a free food item to a friend who also plays Restaurant City, so they can feed their staff and keep them going.

The icon with money and ingredients on it, is the Market icon. This is where you can buy ingredients to upgrade your dishes in Restaurant City.

The Cd with music note icon is where you can choose the song that is playing in your restaurant. Extra songs cost money, and require a music player.

The camera icon allows you to take screen shots of your restaurant.

The magnifying glass is your Hire Friends icon. This allows you to pick among your friends as workers for your restaurant. Often if your friends play Restaurant City, they will have better looking characters, so its a good idea to get them to play as well.

By clicking the street icon in Restaurant City, you can view the outside of your restaurant, as well as your neighbors' restaurants. The main parts of the outside of your restaurant are as follows; a sign, your building, and any decorations you choose to put with your restaurant. Again, the large amount of customization, is impressive.

By clicking the arrows to the left and right of your restaurant, you can view other restaurants on your block. If you have friends who also play Restaurant City, they appear on your block. You can trade ingredients with them, as well as help them keep their restaurant clean. These are also your peers, so competition is somewhat inevitable. When the neighbor upgrades the size of their building, you will feel the pressure to do so also.

By clicking on the redecorate icon, within Restaurant City, you get access to all the furniture and other things you can use to really make your restaurant your own. This is where creativity and skill tend to blend together, as a player attempts to create a functional restaurant, but at the same time, create one that looks very inviting.

The large amount of items available for a player to choose from really allows you to make it your own. If you want a stuffy fine dinning restaurant, you can make it. If you want a classy burger joint, its up to you. If you want a dark dungeon where only a fool would wander in, its yours to create. Customization is by far, this game's strongest selling point.

This ends the informative section of the review of Restaurant City. While we would like to go into each section of the menu bar at length, we feel that most people learn video games by playing them, rather than reading about them. So if you have further questions on how to do something within Restaurant City, check out the FAQ posted on the bottom of this page. It links directly to the Restaurant City FAQ. Remember, this is a review for Restaurant City, not a walk through. The forums and FAQ are great resources for getting help. Also check the comments section down below. In my previous reviews, that has been a hotbed of troubleshooting and helpful tips. (If you have tips, go ahead and post them, no one will mind)

This review of Restaurant City will take a look at three different aspects of the game. The first is going to be Gameplay, followed by Graphics, and lastly Multiplayer Cooperation.

Gameplay Score 9

Gameplay in Restaurant City, is very fun, just not very fast pace. This is a game where a user leaves the game running, and does other things while money and experience pile up. That is this game's only weakness as far as this review is concerned, and it hardly qualifies as a weakness. See the Review's break down of Gameplay in Restaurant City below for more details.

Graphics Score 10

Multiplayer in Restaurant City, is very well integrated. The game gives many different reasons for a player to head out and check out competition, but that doesn't dominate the game. A user can concentrate on his or her own affairs without being punished, or be socialite. This is great in a game that is about choice. While an action element integrating multiplayer and some face paced content could be well placed here, we didn't think that warranted any downgrading of the score. For more information, check out the filled out review for Restaurant City's multiplayer below.

Multiplayer Score 10

Restaurant City is a somewhat passive game. Not driven by user interaction, it mainly is impacted by a different variable, Time. People wander into your restaurant, and that flow of customers is maintained by your popularity number. There is no way (currently) to speed up or slow down time.

Many people who enjoy Restaurant City, are looking for a game to play and maintain on their work breaks or in between doing other things. It is a fun and lighthearted game, that won't force you into sitting in front of the computer for long periods of time. If that is the type of game you are looking for, then Restaurant City is your type of game. If you enjoy more active games that demand all of your attention, then it probably is not your type.

That is the only criticism we can really give this game in terms of game play, that it does not span that gap and give more control to the user, to entertain those who want it. We would like to see both elements within these types of games. Passive, and aggressive. Otherwise we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Downgrading the perfect score of 10, this Review gives Restaurant City a 9 in the category of Gameplay.

The graphics of Restaurant City are very cute. This is probably done to reach their intended audience of non-gamers. All we can say is, wow, very well done.

This style tends to bring thoughts of Nintendo's Wii to mind, and really there is no reason that Restaurant City shouldn't be there. The graphics are that professional. Done in a Japanese theme, the cartoon drawings for this game are very cute. The theme carries throughout the entire game as well, leaving no parts looking untouched or out of place. Every menu, every button is styled in the same way.

Bravo, for this category, this Review gives Restaurant City a 10

Last but not least, this Review takes a look at Restaurant City's Multiplayer aspects. Since its platform is a social network, we would expect that this game really do quite a bit to interact with friends and other people of Facebook.

Restaurant City does not disappoint. Allowing users to view and grade other character's restaurants, as well as clean up neighbors' restaurants, and giving ingredient bonuses for being the first to take a look at another person's restaurant, Restaurant City gives a player plenty of reasons to venture out. Also, if you notice, your friends, even ones that do not play the game, will wander into your restaurant, and be served.

Allowing your restaurant to be rated in Restaurant City, means that the entire Facebook community that uses Restaurant City, can view your restaurant, and grade it. I would definitely wait until you are sure your restaurant is completed before you do this, otherwise you risk creating a large deficit of bad ratings.

The only thing that we thought of that could of further enhanced Restaurant City's multiplayer was if there was some sort of competition between restaurants, like a cook off, that was fast paced and required more skill than time. (unlike having a great restaurant) That way people who have been playing Restaurant City for a while and those that are just starting could compete and still enjoy the game together. Since this idea still falls under gameplay and we did downgrade the gameplay score for no intense action, we won't hurt Restaurant City's multiplayer score for that as well. Overall Restaurant City does a great job given its foundation to incorporate multiplayer aspects into gameplay.

Again, great job, this Review gives Restaurant City a 10 for Multiplayer.

Restaurant City, was a very pleasant game to review. It really is a great game to play, whilst doing something else. It runs great in the background while creating Hubpages or any other computer work. This review loves the customization factors that Restaurant City provides as well as a the light spirited distraction it represents.

In conclusion, we would definitely recommend playing Restaurant City if you need a brief distraction throughout the day to keep yourself motivated. It tends to work better than straight Facebook in terms of a simple distraction, because with Restaurant City, you can check in, clean up a spot here and there, feed your employees, and get straight back to work. Unlike Facebook itself which can derail even the most task oriented people.

On a side note, thanks so much Play Fish for getting back to me and approving my use of screenshots!

Restaurant City Fourms This is where you should go to better enhance you Restaurant City experience. The information contained in these pages is gold for running a great restaurant.

Facebook.com This is the social networking site that houses Restaurant City. You will need an account on Facebook to play Restaurant City.

PlayFish.com These are the guys who created Restaurant City and many cool other games as well. You should check them out.