Review: Amelie's Cafe: Halloween

Type: Time Management
Platform: PC
Price: USD 6.99 from Big Fish Games

Amelie's Cafe gets dressed up with a Halloween theme.

Gameplay
As the owner of the cafe, Amelie is in charge of taking orders and serving the food. Each counter in the cafe prepares only one type of food. Some of the counters are staffed by one of Amelie's staff and these types of counters needs the most care and maintenance. You will need to click on the counters to get the staff to start preparing the food. The counters will get dirty while the staff prepares the food so you will need to keep an eye on the cleanliness levels of the counters. Once it gets too dirty, you can't prepare any more food on the counter until you clean it up.

The faster you perform your actions, the more the bonus bar at the bottom gets filled up. To claim the bonus, you have to match three of the same type by clicking away the unwanted ones. The goal of each stage is to earn a certain amount of money displayed in the top right corner. At the end of each stage, you will also be shown whether you have met the optional requirements eg. whether you have served all the customers, kept your counters clean right til the end etc.

Thoughts
This is a time management game, nothing more and nothing less. There are just stages and stages of frantic cooking and serving customers in the cafe, broken up by cut scenes. There are no complex storyline or mini games or trophies. But I think people who like time management games will like this because it is at heart a pretty fun time management game without the unnecessary and perhaps distracting additions.

Playing the game seems easy at first as it is just a matter of clicking here and there. Unlike other time management games like Spa Mania, there is no extra step to do at each station. So the pace of the game can get really fast. There are so many things happening at the same time that it is difficult to keep an eye on everything. I hardly even have time to think!

The game is rather weak in graphics and it looks a little pixelated on my 1920 x 1080 screen. I also think the style isn't cute and looks a little ugly but that's my personal bias. Thankfully the pace of the game is so fast, that I hardly have time to notice the graphics after a while.

Verdict ★★★
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