| Quick Verdict: Food Park Manager is a management game that feels very nostalgic from how it plays to how it looks. It’s good for someone looking for a retro-feeling game or wants repetitive gameplay. It’s cute from a nostalgic lens, but the issues with the ingredient management were the only thing that dampened my gameplay experience. |
| Game: | Food Park Manager |
| Developer(s): | Drix Dev |
| Publisher: | Drix Dev |
| Review Score: | 7 |
| Cozy Score: | 9 |
| Price: | $9.99 |
| Pros: | It has straightforward gameplay and feels like a very nostalgic game. |
| Cons: | The manager doesn’t appear to do what it is meant to do and you can only buy ingredients in increments of 10 or by typing in the numbers. |
| Platforms: | Steam |
| Genres: | Management, Simulation, City Builder |
Food Park Manager is a tycoon-type game about building up and managing a park complete with food stalls, entertainment, and the ability to design a wide space of land into whatever configuration you’d like.
You start with one small square to build on, but as you gain more traction and money, you can buy up parcels of land to expand until you’ve acquired the full square. To achieve this, you’ll need to manage employees, keep the ingredients stocked, and cater to your customers not just in price, but by recipe as well.
As your customers try your food stalls, they may have requests that you alter a recipe. You’ll fiddle with their suggestions until you have the perfect recipe and have set a fair price for them.
Food Park Manager gives the air of stepping back in time. If you loved classics like RollerCoaster Tycoon, then you’re probably going to enjoy the vibe here. There’s nothing super flashy or particularly new here, but it does pull on nostalgic heartstrings pretty hard.
Food Park Manager: Right in the feels
When it comes to Food Park Manager, there’s really not a lot in the way of things to do, but the simplicity of it just adds to that feeling of playing a retro game. You start with one little piece of land that you try to cram stalls, tables, and amenities into. You eventually turn a profit to open up another piece of land, cram more things into it, and repeat.
Strictly speaking, you could open up the front bits of land and never touch anything else since there’s enough room to put all the stalls and win the game. However, you’ll want to unlock the other bits of land to be more creative because otherwise, you’d have nothing else to do.
I’m about 50 days in and the gameplay is pretty barebones. If the stalls have no recipe or price changes, you start your day by buying up the ingredients that you need for the day. You’re supposed to be able to employ a manager that you can rebuy the ingredients for you, but I’ll be totally honest with you – it’s broken. Or, I just don’t know how it works.
You basically “if this, then that” the process by telling it if stocks are underneath a certain number, then it should buy ‘x’ amount of replacements. It never did this correctly for me. It definitely bought things, but not in the amounts that I wanted it to. In fact, at one point, it seemed to be overbuying in certain ingredients, but not the others.
There’s no way to tell it which ingredients to buy or let you specify anything. It’s just those two bits of information, but I don’t understand it and there’s no tutorial to explain it. So, I had to manually buy up the ingredients every single day and I’m up to the point where I need stocks of 4,500+ ingredients.
I am once again asking you to restock my ingredients…
Here’s where the next issue is, you can only buy ingredients singularly or in increments of 10. You can’t do higher increments, but you can type in a number. So, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but having to input numbers for about 20 ingredients every single day isn’t fun.
If you could set each ingredient with a number that you want your stocks to stay at, that would have been a better system. It’s not as simple as having 1 number for everything because some ingredients are used several times for a recipe or across several recipes at different stalls.
Once you have your stores back up to where you need them, you can start the day. Early on, you’ll be able to manage trash, but once you hire a cleaner, there’s not much for you to do except sit and watch. At 8 AM and 3 PM, the ingredient market opens up, so if you run low on something, you have a chance to restock it, but other than that, you have nothing to do. Thankfully, you can speed up the day, but once the day is done, you just repeat the steps.
Every so often, you’ll be able to promote employees, add more stalls, or beautify the area. But, that’s kind of it.
It’s fun if you’re not looking for something complicated. It definitely gives you a heavy dose of nostalgia, but beyond that, I can’t really say who this game is for. You can get most of the achievements in one day with the hardest requiring you to play through 365 days. I can’t imagine having the patience to deal with ingredients that many times if I’m honest.
Food Park Manager is good, but not great. It’s a nice little nostalgic game to kill an afternoon or two, but that’s about it.
If you want to try out Food Park Manager for yourself, you can get it for $9.99 on Steam. I’m not really sure that it’s worth that price for the gameplay value, so try the demo first. In truth, I feel like this is more of a 6.5, but we don’t do half-scores. I do know that I wouldn’t class it as a solid 6.
Otherwise, you can check out the review we did on Promise Mascot Agency. It’s a whacky open-world game where you play as a disgraced Yakuza member sent to a run-down town to build up a mascot agency.
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