Welcome to our review of Arcade Tycoon, where if you ever dreamt about running an arcade, you are in for a treat!
Arcade Tycoon lets the player design, manage, and build in this amazing world of classic isometric pixel art. Keep the guests happy by choosing from using a list of hundreds entertainment machines and decorative items. Remember that a happy guest spends more of their hard-earned dollars. Discover new games, tech and staff using the research and unlocking menus. Inspired by Two Point Hospital, Megaquarium and Game Dev Tycoon.
Delight your guests with a huge variety of entertainment including consoles, pinball, retro, modern day, shooters, pool, ice hockey, virtual reality and more. Create awesome-looking themed areas by purchasing unique attractions and decorating all aspects: floors, walls, pictures, and all the required and very handy facilities.
Build and manage arcades at such diverse locations as the ghetto, wacky museums, theme parks, pirate ship, shopping malls and haunted hotels or you can have a casual game with the sandbox mode, and still experience expansion and growth.
Prepare to be visited by aliens, thieves, raging customers who will drop litter, crave specific machines and need access to food and drinks. Select from a range of staff, whose wages depend on their skill levels. Security, cleaners, technician and entertainers are waiting to help with the guests’ needs.
Arcade Tycoon is one of those very promising simulator games where you get to develop your own niche, in this case, an arcade. While it does an excellent job at pretty much everything, there also lies the sole problem I had with this game. The amount of everything is really overwhelming and especially at first might even be too much for a casual player.
From installing a toilet for guests to hiring robot cleaners to hiring mechanics to just the basic layout of the arcade, you get bombarded with all these fun things to do. Don’t get me wrong here, this is an amazing game and probably much better than I anticipated it to be, but that first hour where you get thrown into the deepest pits of hell (the tutorial), those are hard to ignore. Yes, the game is fun, but damn, there is a ton you need to learn and you do not get a free pass.
No, straight from the start, everything is all about learning every single aspect of the arcade empire you want to build. It starts with power management, analytics of how things are going and all out reports on how customers are feeling. I did find the entire 10 people visiting in my garage where I happen to have physical space for 6 arcade machines, a soda machine and another vending machine for snacks, it was quite overwhelming, but you got to start somewhere, right?
All in all, if you do want to spend time learning the mechanics and do want to invest energy into this one, Arcade Tycoon may very well be one of the best simulators out there, despite its niche origins and that is the actual strength of this game, niche yet inviting you to keep playing.
In conclusion, Arcade Tycoon may easily become a sleeper hit among the lovers of the genre, now being on Switch as well, it can only hope to get even more players (pun intended)
