Cafe World Review

Clotifoth takes a look at Cafe World by Zynga, one of the popular casual, social games found on Facebook.

One does not need to look hard to find evidence of casual games on the internet.  Especially users of Facebook, who get bombarded with countless Zynga game updates, the presence of casual games is unmistakable.  Farmville players alone total more than triple the number of World of Warcraft subscribers.  With all of this fandom of these games, there must be some merit to them and with  this inspirationm, I began to play one of Zynga's popular casual games, Café World.
   
The premise of Café World, much like Zynga’s other games, is deceptively simple: you run a café. By cooking food, maintaining a profit, laying out a shop, you gain experience in the form of Café Points (CP) and currency in the form of standard coins as you cook your way to greatness.  Your cooking starts out with a mere 3 items, but quickly explodes into such a menu that you would pray every real world café would follow in its stead.
   
The graphical style of Café World is similar to many casual games: cartoony.  However, it differs from other gems such as Farmville in that it has a faux-3D aspect added in by making the characters generally 3D entities. This, added to a lot smoother animation compared to some games, gives Café World a fun feel, especially when you have a large and busy enough café that you can step back and appreciate the game's feel.  Unfortunately, it lacks a fullscreen function, and the 3D characters sometimes glitch by passing under the floor (giving the feeling of invisible patrons ordering plates of food by magic, and the bites disappearing into thin air!) when there is a lot of characters in the café at once.  This may be different from a high end computer, but that one glitch tarnishes an otherwise flawless cartoon style.
   
While the grid system of Café World may come off as uninspired by comparison to other, the gameplay is dependent on the various laws of the ground.  Your goal, essentially, is either to make your café look beautiful (an easy task given how wonderful the graphics are already) or to make it efficient; this means placing tables, chairs, counters and stoves in such a perfect configuration that you can squeeze in as many people as possible while making sure your waiters and waitresses can access each table and each counter, and all this with the thought that if it is too inefficient at any point, you could lose valuable publicity (Buzz) as customers get fed up and leave.  The sub-game of designing your café is amazing in itself, but then there is the planning of cooking.  Dishes that are eventually cooked range from bacon cheeseburgers to bagels with lox, spaghetti and meatballs, pot roast... however, one cannot cook willy-nilly in this game, for there are always more stoves than counters and food spoils if you leave it on the stove, so you must plan your dishes to optimally use the counters, and to plan your schedule around it (or it around your schedule) as some of these dishes can take up to two entire days to cook.  The game is like Othello; learn in five minutes, master in a lifetime.  The depth present in a game sometimes regarded as nonsensical is astounding.
   
Casual games such as those produced by Zynga often feature social interaction as a key part of themselves, and Café World is no exception.  There is the obligatory neighbor system and you can gift food items as well as “project” parts such as parts to a super stove or a spice rack, and visit each others' cafés to take in the view of business, and to spice each others' dishes on the stove to give a significant bonus amount of servings per dish when finished, or to save a spoiled dish.  In addition, they can try each other's food (don't worry, this doesn't take away from your or their food!) and leave free tips- in essence, they can be a customer to their friends' cafés!  The social element, especially with networking considered, is taken advantage of well in this game.
   
Café World is a highly engaging game, hungry for your time, and in return providing you with a good social outlet and an overall fun game to play.  To sum up:

Pros:

• Overall, very fun
• Graphics well presented
• Very deep game, depending how you play
• Social networking greatly implemented
   

Cons:

• Graphics often glitch with character models when lots are on screen
• Game can be laggy, especially if you have other items running in the browser

This considered, it is plain to see that Café World deserves a rating of 9.5 out of 10.