Blood Bar Tycoon Review (PC) – Bloody Mary’s For Everyone

When it comes to spin-off imaginations of popular series or genres, I’m not sure I’d have guessed at a vampire themed Two Point or blood-infused Planet Coaster. Blood Bar Tycoon demonstrates why my creative muscles are largely atrophied, as while the concept is as murky as a Zombie cocktail, it’s got some great flavour in its punch.

Much like the Two Point series, Blood Bar Tycoon is a business simulation and management game. Serving drinks, pleasing customers and racking up the dollar bills is the aim of the game. Only this time, some of your customers feast on the innards of your other customers. I guess you could call it the circle of life… only vampires are technically immortal by usual means so… the circle of never-ending life? Too much philosophy for a bar, so let’s drink up our bloody beers and decide if this is an establishment worth frequenting or tearing apart in a messy, vomit slinging brawl.

Bar Wight!

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time with Two Point Campus, Hospital or any other tycoon titled series, you’ll feel right at home here. Blood Bar Tycoon is set up in an almost identical way in terms of structure. You start on one of the handful of increasingly challenging maps, constructing rooms for your bars, assigning staff to tend to your customers and gradually improving your facilities as you earn more of that sweet, sweet blood money (quite literally).

The interface is pretty intuitive, with every icon you need handily located on the left or the top of your screen. While construction is as easy as dragging across tiles on the map, there’s an ever so slight lack of pinpoint accuracy that can make it infrequently troublesome. Start planting some rooms and objects though, and it’ll quickly feel like second nature, especially if you’re experienced in the genre.

Blood Bar Tycoon’s biggest degree of separation is of course, the presence of fanged pasty creatures that dwell upon the night and hate garlic. You’ll be required to simultaneously provide the basic boozing bars for standard yokel humans in order to drum up funds and the red nectar of their hemoglobin, while also catering to the more demanding needs of your vampiric clientele. I didn’t find it genre defining by any means, but it provides some creative opportunities for building designs and gameplay objectives.

If a lowly human character stumbles into a scene of one of your staff having a munch on one of their dear friends, they’ll spark into a frenzy for example. Moreover, vampires might quite like seeing a human specimen in a cage or an ice tomb as part of the decoration, but their work buddies they came out for a drink with probably won’t. It’s relatively standard fare for the genre design wise, but it’s a light-hearted and entertaining spin on the formula. Bit like mixing rum and cider for a change of pace from Coca-Cola.

Bloody Nora, That’s Strong

Blood Bar Tycoon follows this gameplay loop throughout its handful of levels – build up the bar, complete objectives for the head honchos of the night, attain 1-3 stars, move on to the next. It’s a tried-and-tested approach that once again, works well, because it always does. I found getting the second and third star could vary between relatively easy, to more grindy than a set of fangs trying to strawpedo a Smirnoff Ice. Occasionally, labourious objectives like sending 100 items for 4 different types of drinks would become a bit too much, but for the most part, these bars are enjoyable to spend time in.

Room variety is pretty good, with the more understated initial “Cheap” and “Vampire” options giving way to “Disco”, “Cyperpunk” and “Art Deco”. Functionally, they all work the same, which is a shame. All involve only having a bar, tables, chairs and a toilet, with decorations being the only distinctive aspect about them. Don’t get me wrong, the visuals of the rooms are wonderful and pack a stronger hit than a Jagerbomb, but one of the most interesting aspects of something like Evil Genius: World Domination 2 is how each room has its own unique purpose.

Luckily, some of that is achieved in Blood Bar Tycoon thanks to the… imaginative… ways you can create special menu drinks. Bloody Smokers, Bloody Tea Makers, Bloody Shakers and the like all produce different varieties of our favourite night-out tipples, only you know, doused in iron flavour on account of the red blood cells. The items and comical traps you can use to capture humans are good fun, fitting both the light-hearted, slapstick tone and humerous gameplay.

Less luckily, is that your staff almost seem as drunk as a bunch of Brits abroad at times. I had staff refuse to move, no matter what order I gave. Some wouldn’t unload machines, cratering my much needed production down to a halt. Bodies would be left out to decompose, not exactly an ideal method of avoiding detection by authorities it must be said. About 95% of the time, your lackeys will do their jobs as hoped, but when that 5% act like teenage Saturday staff who’ve been on a 3-day booze fest prior to their shift, it can be frustrating.

Spitting Bars… Of Blood

Should your bars start to fall out of control in terms of their blood lust, or like me, you just willfully let a human out of a cage right in the middle of your dastardly detainment room, you’ll need to take quick action. Humans that spot your rather grizzly methods of production won’t want to seize the means, but shut it down altogether. To that end, you’ll occasionally deal with Investigators and Hunters. They’re supposed to be a substantial threat, but barring an objective requiring low awareness, they’re not much of a bother.

Your minions can even have a trait which means they’ll automatically detect and eliminate them, so having a handful of them eradicates all threat, even on the harder difficulty. Moreover, you can pay a substantial fee to not worry about them for 30 days. By the time you have that option, your bars will be raking in huge amounts, effectively trivialising the problem until the final level. If there’s one aspect I think Blood Bar Tycoon could improve, it’s the difficulty curving, as it’s currently too easy to get through, with 3 stars only requiring grind as opposed to testing your mettle.

It’s a lovely entry point for beginners, a welcoming bar for newbies, but it doesn’t have that chiseled charm of an old and testy establishment that keeps its regulars for a long time. Even in other similar series, your starting parameters or level restrictions up the ante to keep things fresh, but Blood Bar Tycoon doesn’t have quite enough of this to help hit the same heights. Even so, I still very much enjoyed my time with the game. Having a dozen different rooms/bars bustling with guests, seeing them fall down a trap door to their doom, basking in the neon glaze of the Cyberpunk room.

Blood Bar Tycoon has some great fundamentals and its a good entry into the business management genre, it’s just a spirit or two short of a fully stocked bar. Visually it does well with zesty colour schemes, unique decors and humerous animations (watching staff trip over sick is cartoonishly grin-inducing). The dialogue is similarly humerous and barely even puts up a pretense of seriousness, which works. Even the objective descriptors get to a point of just stating “you know how to do this by now”, small touches, but they never failed to make me smirk.

The Vampire Tycoon Diaries

For an indie studio effort, Blood Bar Tycoon is a fun, brightly lit and entertaining hole to sink your fangs into, ironically for a business catering to creatures of darkness. It doesn’t have quite the depth necessary to challenge the very best in the genre, and I was able to complete most of the content within about seven hours or so. It’s not a hefty package, but it’s a nicely flavoured, pleasant shot to knock back, bit like an Apple Sourz.

If you’re in the market for a new stomping ground of business simulation action, you could certainly do much worse. Blood Bar Tycoon will fill the void, offering some visually engaging beers alongside a suite of decent liqueurs. Particularly with Two Point Museum on the horizon, it’s a little overshadowed by the big names on the street, but this plucky bar has enough character and charm to be a worthwhile joint.

Blood Bar Tycoon is available now on PC via Steam (review platform).

Developer: Clever Trickster Studio
Publisher: Clever Trickster Productions

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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