As someone who has worked about every job of a brewpub and then picked up homebrewing beer and wine, and cider, and mead, and… as a hobby after I left food service, I feel uniquely qualified to judge how true to life the Brewpub Simulator videogame from Movie Games S.A. happens to be. So far I have to say, it’s fine.
Brewpub Simulator
Developer: Star Drifters
Price: $17.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
The look of the brewpub is fantastic. At first glance I knew this place and have enjoyed many a pint in these darkened halls, even going so far as being able to name which establishments they were (shout out to Cock & Bull in Green Bay and the former Irish Pub in Milwaukee).
The bar and beer logo generator is a great source of entertainment as you cycle through the random options, but it feels like there are too many options while also very limited in what it can produce.
The gameplay of filling beers for patrons is a fun balancing act of addressing new customers and trying to keep the place clean. You feel a familiar rush pouring a pint, handing it off, just to quickly hop to the tables to clear and bus them, trying to beat that same person about to sit down. The dialog while chatting them up is funny, dancing between overly cliched and things I’ve heard while tending. My only issue with the game in the front of house is that I can’t give away free half fills after killing the keg, and kicking people out of the bar is not nearly satisfying enough. Here’s hoping for a dive expansion with a bat hidden under the bar you can pull out when they refuse to leave.
Then there’s the absolute joy of launching the full trash bags into the dumpster at the end of the night without fully stepping out of the back room, or the satisfying swish of empty containers landing in the garbage during your brew day. And the humorous dialog with anyone willing or being forced to talk to you.
My biggest complaints, though, are in the back of house. Brewing the beer is not fun or enjoyable and feels like a minigame that I just wish I could skip. Thankfully, once you do brew a beer you can purchase full kegs of it and bypass it entirely. It’s too simple with recipes that are close enough to real ones, but the bumpers on the brewing either mean you can’t make a bad batch without drifting away from the recipe or you completely screw it up. I could leave the lid of my fermenter off for a week and still get a good beer instead of having my batch becoming so infected I have to throw away my fermenter.
Another issue is how strict Brewpub Simulator keeps you to the recipes which are locked up behind checkpoints. So making a perfectly subtable Milk Chocolate Stout will get one star because it’s not an American Pale Ale, but there’s no Stout option until you get further in the game. This makes the game that much more frustrating because that one star beer would be better than any highly rated APA to progress the story mode. Similarly, by adding yeast to your fermenter instead of the boil pot results in no fermentation which was a problem for me for a few game days because it made no sense to me.
Is this complaint coming from someone who is over invested in the homebrewing beer, partially disregarding the disclaimer “Keep in mind that the brewing process portrayed in this game is simplified.” A little. Thankfully, if you do want a homebrewing simulator, Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator does already exist.
My last issue is with the Story Mode. It feels too limiting and hand holding in the wrong areas. It forces you to change the look of your walls and use the Material Changer, but didn’t say that the Material Changer was in the Inventory. It tells you step-by-step how to brew a beer, but if you do it out of order because of old brewing habits, such as adding hops at the beginning of the boil instead before turning on the heat, you have to trick the game via a boiled pot of water to advance the quest. I also don’t enjoy how the Sandbox mode is locked behind completing the Story mode. You know how to run this bar after 2 nights, there aren’t going to be any major changes to the gameplay.
Brewpub Simulator doesn’t feel finished. There area handful of UI quirks that are unhelpful. Talkingto customers you have to be perfectly in front of them, when setting the price of a beer it has to be done via a slider with you unable to type it in, and the tips and quests aren’t always well explained. There are also a handful of silly collision issues that resulted in a couple of patrons stuck between two chairs and breaking my door because I put a table a little too close to it.
The good news is the developers are still hard at work flushing it out, but with a month or two of patience it should be a fantastic game. But until then, I need to remodel this kitchen so I can brew and rack another batch of beer in my sleep, or more accurately hungover as I’m scheduled to clopen all week in my little pub.
The Final Word
Brewpub Simulator has the base of what it takes to be a great game, but with enough odd hiccups that keep pulling you out of it. If Movie Games S.A. keeps tinkering away it will get there, but today I am feeling underserved.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
