Review: Blood Bar Tycoon feels a bit like trying to draw blood from a stone

Blood Bar Tycoon is a game where you’re a vampire who runs a – surprise – blood bar. You start in the dives and gradually work your way to better bars by earning prestige. You do this in a number of ways, from getting good reviews to furnishing your bar. You’ll employ other vampires who have unique abilities and covertly steal humans to harvest from to fund your business.

I’ve known about this game for months, so when it was finally available to play, I had high expectations and I’m not entirely sure they were met.

Blood Bar Tycoon: The next big game or are you dying to leave?

Blood Bar Tycoon is good on the surface level, but it has some problems. Visually, I think it’s great. You’ve got all your basics covered in NPC design and the overall vibe of the game. I even liked the music because it wasn’t so intrusive as to be distracting.

Initially, everything seemed to be going well. I got a bit turned around on my first bar, but I felt like I had gotten into the swing of things by the second. Your advancement is depicted by a map. You’ll see each little bar pop up to fill it in and each establishment will have 1-3 stars.

In true gaming nature, 3 stars means you’ve reached the peak of perfection in that location. 

As you play, you’ll occasionally be approached by an NPC character who will give you a mission or a bonus. Each character has different mannerisms and responds differently to how you speak to them. If you anger them, they will give you a penalty and if they like you, you’ll get a bonus.

These bonuses can be monetary or just a simple perk like a lower rate on a bank loan. Penalties range from higher rates or not getting as much funding.

Honestly, they’re probably the best part of this game because it’s the only time you feel as if you’re getting direction. You don’t really get a tutorial so much as stumble upon things. There is a place that outlines a lot of information, but it’s easy to forget it even exists. So, while it’s not fair to say there isn’t a tutorial, it’s tucked away. 

Your bar is set up in three different zones to manage. You have your human zone, vampire zone, and minion zone. These are places you can manually assign and usually, it keeps out those not permitted. 

Where is the zone designated for fun? I think it’s missing.

Unfortunately, there are investigators that will try to sneak in and become a problem. If they find you do anything untoward in the minion area, they will create a panic. Other things affect this like blood and corpses staying on the ground too long.

If a panic is induced, it will affect your “awareness” meter. Once it hits 100 out of the 150 points possible, hunters will be dispatched. This gets out of hand quickly and if you’ve not contained it by the time it hits 100, it gets almost unfairly hard to contain.

Oh, did I mention there were two settings? Cozy and Bloody. I played on Cozy and found this to be frustrating, so I can’t imagine how hard these scenarios are on “bloody”. 

You have a couple of options when the panic hits the ceiling. You can hire a vampire to help with the awareness, but good luck finding where to do that. There was no direction, so I had to just manage on my own. I finally figured out that clicking on the banner that shows the awareness is what brings up that menu.

This NPC will help by cutting awareness by 50-100%, but it doesn’t take care of the panicking customers. So, if you can’t get a handle on it, the meter will just climb again.

Other ways to do something is by using your minions to eliminate the customers causing a stir or employing “reaper” minions. Other than that, you’ll have a few powers to use, but they’re on a cool-down timer and are only a band-aid.

I’d love to tell you how the Reaper characters help, but I never saw one. Your minions will have a few different abilities like teleportation or hypnosis which I saw in spades. But, the agency you hire from only refreshes every 9 days and I checked over a dozen times to no avail. 

Finding a reaper minion shouldn’t feel like trying to find a golden ticket.

I suspect those reaper minions only help with hunters anyway, but it was disappointing not to even have the option to see if they would help. 

For your minions, you can assign them tasks and put them in the order that you’d like. So, you can assign a minion to prioritize vampire or human service, drink preparation, cleaning, corpse disposal, capture (if they have hypnosis), and more.

I found that it was important to have at least one minion prioritizing each task to help lessen the opportunity for something to affect awareness.

The only other mechanic I want to talk about is the research points. You gain these steadily and use them to further your blood “factory”. You can trade these points in for access to different blood harvesters and human traps.

This game kind of leaves you to your own devices, so much so that I have half a mind to assume my game is bugged. I’ve been playing this third bar, easily, 10 times longer than the other bars combined.

I’m level 16 prestige, I have nearly 1,000 research points with everything maxed, no star, and I’ve dropped about 3-4 hours in this bar level alone. Every so often, an NPC will offer me a quest, but otherwise, I have no direction.

There is nothing – at least nothing on the main page – that tells me what goal I’m trying to reach. Clearly, I need at least 1 star to advance, but when do I get that? At 20 prestige? At 1,000 positive reviews? What are the parameters for advancement?

Without clear goals, it feels like you’re just wasting time. I don’t know if my game is bugged, but it FEELS like it is and that’s a terrible feeling for a player to have. 

My last qualm is with building onto your bar. It’s, quite frankly, silly. You can’t add on to current buildings and expand them, you have to build entirely new rooms. Luckily, you can break down walls to cause two rooms to join, but you can’t build walls.

Did you need that wall? Sorry, I guess you better start over.

Your only option is to get it right the first time or to entirely demolish a whole room and start over. And, building rooms isn’t exactly forgiving. It had nebulous space requirements. So, if you wanted to add just a little more space to a room, you’re unable to do that.

I had high hopes for Blood Bar Tycoon. I really wanted to love it. I enjoy tycoon games and my little goth heart loved the idea of running a vampire bar. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it functions very well.

This is one that I would leave off of your shelf. You’re welcome to give it a try if you’d like, you can get it on Steam for $19.99. However, I’d recommend trying out a different vampire game we actually enjoyed like Vampire Therapist.