It's a dated game, yeah. But for those who like to play tycoon games where they are in control of everything in a restaurant, it gets pretty addicting to check profits and figure out how to reach the goals in each scenario. The first campaign starts a bit hard because not everything is accessible and the player is expected to play with whatever the tutorial gives. I had to fire more than 5 servers before I found two that wouldn't be rude to customers because I didn't have access to staff training yet. Managing the restaurants is no easy task as the player is expected to know how to be successful in finances and food.

Players could easily cheat by using codes that are readily available, but where's the fun in that? Some might complain about the super bright glowing effects when they first play the game, but that can be remedied by turning off all glow features in "Settings". Eventually, the player will be in control of what s/he wants to put in the restaurant as well as serve in the restaurant while keeping in mind of ratings. There's a little bit of free customization for the floors, walls, and employee outfits.

Time passes in a day in the game's universe, meaning the restaurant operates within 24 hours and every minute counts. At the end of the day, whatever money that is generated is multiplied by 30 or 31 to represent monthly revenue or profits. Therefore, the player should avoid wasting too much time by letting the minutes pass while deciding how to arrange furniture or improve recipes, but that's why the pause button is there!

Overall, someone who is easily enticed by tycoon or management games can get easily stuck in his or her seat for a few hours trying to get perfect ratings or avoiding debt (at least... I did.)

Overall, it's a fun game but there are some negatives to it.
Its fun setting up the restaurant. Placing the tables just right so there are no traffic issues. That way people don't have to wait too long for their food. Decorating the inside and outside of the restaurant so your place looks classy. Entering the cooking contests to climb the chef ranks. Being able to control every aspect of your restaurants and watching them make money is gratifying.

There haven't been updates or improvements to this game from the first Restaurant Empire. Heck, you could probably consider this a long delayed expansion pack to the first one. Armand, the main character is still wearing the same pants. They were ugly then and they're still ugly today! If you didn't like the first Restaurant Empire, you won't like the second one. The AI of your employees is still really frustrating. Your restaurants are still not going to be perfect. And no matter what you do or how well you do it, customers are going to complain. They're never happy! (and I do mean never!) Some of the scenarios can be maddening to try and complete. Despite all this, the game does keep me entertained.

Let me start with a story;

A long time ago, back when Waffles© was just a wee lad, he had a grand total of ten dollars and fifty cents. Being the spendthrift little boy as he was, he ventured into the local Walmart store to find a jolly old game to play on his parents computer. Little boy Waffles© soon found a cheerful looking game by the name of Restaurant Empire that he immediantly began to want for. The total price of the game? $10.00 (and 50 cent tax). He gleefully skipped to the check-out counter where he paid his ten and fifty and ran home to enjoy his new-found game. Ohh but what fun he had playing this joy of a game! Hours upon hours where spent building restaurants, organizing menus, and hiring staff. The young boy who was Waffles© was overjoyed at this seemly limitless game!

A dozen years later, grown man Waffles© browses the Steam store to find another game to review in a dire attempt to become noticed by the Steam community. Startled, he runs across a familiar title: Restaurant Empire II. What? Was he being decived? His childhood game had a sequel? And was on Steam? Thanking Gaben, Waffles© quickly bought the game instead of Super Noah's Ark 3D, downloaded, and installed it. A couple hours later, here he is, ready to give his honest opinion on the game.


Restaurant Empire II is a restaurant tycoon simulator where you take control of a young chef, fresh out of culinary school and ready to take on the Omnifood corporation. The game plot is rather simple, and most of the mechanics are even more so. The main goal of the game is to keep your customer satisfaction level high in order to maintain a five stay rating. You do so by selecting dishes that have high ratings, updating your furniture to increase comfort levels, placing decorations to... well, increase your decoration level, and hiring and training staff to provide the best customer care possible. In the sandbox mode, this is actually quite easy as you start out with a large building and you cannot start out with lower than $500,000. I simply furnished the bottom floor, hired my staff and spent $10,000 a month on training them (after several months there were virtually no complaints about them), added only dishes that had a 75% or above approval rating, and decorated the floor so extravagantly that a four star rating was achieved in a few months in game time. The five star rating took only about a year!

Really, the main strength of the game is the original campaign which only gives you $40,000 to start out with. Although you also begin with a fully decked out kitchen, dining room, and restrooms, you still have to add decoration, add dishes, hire staff, etc. Several of the options (such as advertising and training) are blocked so the jerks who are your staff act all high and mighty for the first dozen challenges without the ability for you to stop them. To throw a curveball when you least expect it, a well known character in the game gives you $250,000 to set up and maintain his nephew's new restaurant, which has no kitchen or restrooms. Meaning you have to set up everything with the money you've saved up to that point. The challenge is real and completing all objectives can be difficult but fun.

Because the mechanics are so simple, I really have to look at the game as a whole in order to give my full opinion on it, and frankly, there is not much to see. Perhaps if the game had a fancy HD remastering, or an ambitious remake, the appeal would be greater. The game feels pulled out of it's time in the steam market with fancy titles like Prison Tycoon, or Tropico V to keep it company, but without the aesthetic of it's counter parts it largely goes unnoticed. Despite this, I wholeheartedly recommend Restaurant Empire II to the individual looking for such a game. Maybe it's the nostalgia kid in me happy to play this game once again, but REII is a joy to play and quite simply a time waster for tycoon fans to enjoy.

I rate this game 6.5/10, would loose childhood in again.

Thank you for your time!

The Older but not Wiser
Waffles©

This game has two storyline campaigns:
1. An improved version of Restaurant Empire 1 where you build French, Italian, and American restaurants
2. The actual sequel to the first game's storyline where you build desert and coffee houses as well such as French, American, German restaurants

The scenarios were really easy to beat such as get X revenue/profit and/or Y customers in the allocated time. All you need to do is align your tables to maximize your servers' mobility and put a bunch of decorations everywhere to boost your restaurant's rating.

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I've played a lot of tycoon games in my childhood and it's saddening to see this genre die. After playing this game, I can see why. The concepts are great but the execution is terrible.

Gameplay in a nutshell:
1. Pause game
2. Place tables and decorations in your restaurant
3. Hire staff
4. Add recipes to the menu
5. Save game
6. Fast forward time
7. ???
8. Profit!

My biggest complaint with this game is that whenever you get access to a higher quality ingredient supplier, you need to go into EACH recipe to change your supplier. Once you've done that, you have to adjust the price of that recipe in EACH restaurant. If you don't do these steps, your food ratings and/or your profit margins will drop. I guess the developers wanted to allow more micromanagement but it's annoying when you just want to update all of your restaurants.

Other things to consider:
- There's no 16:9 support
- The textures/models are dated (this game was released in 2009)
- The auto save for the campaign doesn't work for me
- You have a finite number of chefs in the campaign so don't fire them

Overall, I still think it's a decent tycoon game. If you're bored with the other popular tycoon games (e.g. SimCity, Game Dev Tycoon), give this game a shot if it's on sale.

Restaurant Empire II is the sequel to Trevor Chan’s Restaurant Empire which was released back in 2003 and although I have not played the original fans of both games give you the distinct impression that Restaurant Empire II is really just a glorified expansion to the original. Taken on it's own merits however, it's a decent enough management game that unfortunately gets bogged down in minutia and micromanagement rather quickly.

The game starts you off with the campaign from the original game, a new campaign based more around Desert House's and Coffee Shops and a sandbox mode. The sandbox mode however is pretty barebones and many of the staples from the campaigns, such as the minigames, chef reputation, cooking contests etc are removed. Add that to the fact that in Sandbox you start with pretty much everything already unlocked it becomes a rather futile experience.

The campaigns start you off as a small restaurant owner and slowly unlocks content and areas as you progress through various scenarios with pre-set goals. A small dash of storyline is thrown in but it can be safely ignored. Your goals throughout the campaign vary rather wildly in difficulty and it's often best to delay winning the easier scenarios until the very last moment so that you can use the extra time for your chefs and staff to get more skilled and more money to flow into your bank account.

The game at it's core is simple enough, you start a restaurant, place a kitchen, some bathrooms, furnish the seating area, hire some staff, pick a menu and off you go. However once you get going the game becomes anything but simple. The game will often tell you that you have trouble serving meals on time but doesn't give you any information as to why that is. Should you hire more servers? Hire more chefs? Move the tables closer to the kitchen? Solving problems with your restaurants quickly becomes purely trial and error until you get that perfect setup that you will never have to change. It doesn't help that the AI path-finding is nothing short of atrocious.

And that brings us to the menu. As you progress through the game you will start to unlock specialty ingredient suppliers which allows you to increase the quality of your meals at a cost, however using these new high quality ingredient's have to be done individually for each recipe in each restaurant and likewise for changing the price making it an incredibly frustrating experience.

All in all Restaurant Empire II is a game with a few good ideas that are unfortunately marred by it's many design flaws and it's not really a game I'd recommend to anyone but extreme fans of management simulations. If you have a burning desire to play a game that lets you build and manage a chain of eateries I suppose this is really your only choice but if not, then you can find better entertainment elsewhere.

First of all i don't know what's wrong with this game....

It's really really genius


I... I.... ok lets be serious now.


I have played this game enough to know that this game is a master-game, so to speak. I see no problem with it, the graphics are ehhh but the gameplay and the campaigns are good, the ways and things you can make your restaurant is amazing and controlling the restaurant is even more amazing. The campaign Scenario's can be hard, but if you just want to play this game for killing time or something, you can go with the Sandbox Mode!! This game provides everything for every type of player. You can change the dishes in your menu, you can even give discounts when you want, you can increase/decrease the money you spend on a dish i.e you can raise or decrease the Quality of a dish. You can assign a chef to every particular dish and if you don't have time to do that any of your chef creates the recipe and serves it. You can hire people to work for your restaurant like Servers, and Captains who take orders, Receptionists etc etc... You can participate in a cooking competition. You can do almost EVERYTHING you can do in a real life restaurant as its owner. I really recommend this game, it's worth more than it's price. The amount of people who play this game is low because it's too old but i think if people become aware of this game, It could be in the list of the top sellers.

As old as Restaurant Empire II is, nothing on the market comes near to this game!

So just because the title of this game isn't clear, I purchased it because I wanted the old Restaurant Empire 1 and couldn't find it and figured I would give 2 a try. It is actually included, this is both the first and 2nd game. It works on my steam deck using the keyboard and mouse layout. I couldn't figure out how to use a controller so I don't think it has any controller support. I prefer this game to some of the other tycoon type games. The graphics and some of the gameplay are very dated but it's still fun.

ENG:

This is all well and good and functional restaurant simulation game. I've played the previous game version, when I own it. The game is easy to learn and be able to play with this a while. The game is playing by the worm can be difficult and boring at first, like a dictionary to learn things as tutorials will be a bit difficult to follow. I recommend the game anyway. :3


FIN:

Tämä on ihan hyvä ja toimiva ravintola simulaatiopeli. Olen pelannut edellistä peli versiota kun omistin sen. Peli on helppo oppia ja tätä jaksaa pelata tovin. Peliä pelaamatomalla voi olla hankalaa ja tylsää aluksi opetella erillaiset asiat, koska tutoriaalit tahtoo olla vähän hankalia seurata. Suosittelen peliä joka tapauksessa. :3

After over 10 years I still come back and play Restaurant Empire from time to time. No other game Ive found fills the niche. More games need Iron Chef style cooking competitions.