Blood Bar Tycoon Review

I'm a sucker for a kooky management sim that doesn't take itself too seriously. Back in the day, classics like Theme Hospital and Roller Coaster Tycoon offered a chewy management challenge while retaining a sense of humour and silliness. The modern Two Point series—which has so far given us the chance to manage hospitals, university campuses, and museums—has kept that legacy alive. Blood Bar Tycoon is a game in the same vein, but with a unique and rather ingenious theme: running a vampire bar. It's a bit like that episode of Buffy where the vampires take over The Bronze and use it to lure unsuspecting teenagers to their demise. Having managed many theme parks, hospitals, and other familiar locations over the years, I was excited by the thought of designing a drinking hole for immortal bloodsuckers.

What a shame then that Blood Bar Tycoon seemed determined to suck the fun out of almost every moment. Although there are glimpses of what could be an enjoyable experience, I found it difficult to appreciate them through a haze of bugs and interface problems that range from funny to infuriating. When the game did allow me to play it, I found management mechanics that hint at an interesting gameplay loop but currently lack depth.

You'll start with either an empty patch of waste ground or a basic bar in need of expansion and refurbishment. Gameplay proceeds from an overhead isometric point of view, with you peering into your bar from above, building rooms and placing furniture on a grid. You'll want to build separate rooms for your human ‘cattle', vampire clientele, and minions (staff). The rooms for human customers are the most straightforward: plop down a bar, at least one table and chairs, and hire a minion or two, and they will serve up beers, wine and cocktails, making you a tidy profit in the process. The vampire ‘VIP' areas work much the same, except that vampire patrons require drinks made from human blood.

How do you obtain this blood? Well, the simplest—and least fun—way is to buy blood packs from a menu screen. A much more nefarious and profitable method involves kidnaping and draining your human customers. To do this, you'll need to build a secret back room accessible only to your minions, where you can imprison humans before feeding them into various dastardly machines. Initially, you'll only have access to a machine to drain their blood for basic vampiric cocktails, but you'll eventually unlock bloody ice crushers, shakers, and even a device for giving blood a smokey flavor. You can get unsuspecting humans into your back room by having a minion with the required skill hypnotize them, or by placing various traps in your bar masquerading as innocent arcade games or dancing stages.

Although the gameplay flirts with horror, Blood Bar Tycoon keeps things light with a cell-shaded art style and goofy animations. Watching your human cattle disappear down a trap door and then get strapped to a machine for shaking their blood into a delicious froth looks quite funny, providing you're willing to embrace the game's dark sense of humour. Once you've set up the three basic pillars of your blood bar, it's mostly a case of expanding your operation with new machines and drinks and peppering the place with decorations that boost the bar's prestige (which attracts richer vamps and humans). There are a ton of different decorations that fall into themed categories like ‘country' and ‘industrial' and attract different types of humans and vampires. Decorating the bar was probably the most fun I had with the game, and it was cool to see punk vampires show up to appreciate the cyberpunk aesthetic I had going in one level. Throughout the campaign, vampire overlords will show up to give you missions which basically amount to a gentle tutorial as you slowly unlock all the game's features.

This was all good fun for a while, but after a handful of hours my interest started to wane. While this is obviously not meant to be a taxing strategy game, managing your bar feels a bit too simplistic and hands off. For example, although there are lots of silly traps you can use to imprison human cattle, they are all functionally the same. Likewise, you'll spend quite a while unlocking a menu of different vampire cocktails and the machines needed to make them, but this doesn't really add any complexity or variation to the gameplay. Your minions come with three stats (Intelligence, Speed, Charisma) and one unique ability, such as being able to hypnotise humans or wipe their memories, but otherwise they all function the same and can be assigned to do all the same tasks as one another. By comparison, in Two Point Hospital—an equally approachable and goofy management sim—you are required to hire doctors, nurses, janitors, and other staff members that do different jobs, and build a variety of rooms to cure different diseases, to keep your hospital ticking over. It's not overly complicated, but there is usually an interesting puzzle to be found in building and maintaining an efficient hospital that heals the sick without making a mess of your balance sheet.

Blood Bar Tycoon tries to shake things up with an awareness metre that represents how suspicious your activities seem to the outside world. Various events like allowing your customers to wander into your back room or see dead bodies in your bar will cause your awareness level to rise. If it reaches 100, a posse of vampire hunters will try to infiltrate your bar. You can keep a lid on awareness by having your minions wipe the memory of patrons who've seen something they shouldn't, or simply have them take out the hunters when they show up, although doing so openly runs the risk of spreading panic among your human customers, which further raises awareness and can lead to a swiftly emptying bar.

This system reminded me of the way Jurassic World: Evolution used dinosaur breakouts to spice up what was otherwise a rather simple park management experience. The threat of vampire hunters turning up on your doorstep adds some much needed jeopardy, and makes thematic sense, but it doesn't really add depth to the core gameplay. Corralling your minions to deal with an urgent threat can also be a bit finicky, making vampire hunter attacks more of an annoyance than a thrill.

Despite my grumbles, I'd have probably still had a decently fun time with Blood Bar Tycoon if it weren't for the bugs and interface issues that constantly derailed my experience. For starters, the building tool wouldn't allow me to split an existing room with a new wall, meaning, for example, when I wanted to add toilets to my bar I had to create an entirely new room or demolish and rebuild part of an existing one. Sometimes I wasn't able to create a new room tile on a particular spot for no apparent reason. Demolishing external doors would sometimes cause the game to tell me that there was no way for patrons to access my bar even if there was, and adding new external doors didn't fix the problem.

This turned out to be the first of several serious bugs that forced me to restart a level in order to continue, losing significant progress. Another was when vampire hunters shot and destroyed one of my prison cells, causing the human inside to get locked into a panicked state where my minions couldn't interact with them in any way (perhaps because the game still thought they were locked inside their cell). Since panicking customers prevent you from using the building tools, I was once again soft locked and forced to restart. On several occasions I found myself unable to purchase new drinks for my human customers, which quickly brought my bar to a grinding halt. Since the game only allowed me to have one save file per campaign, I wasn't even able to revert to earlier saves to escape these situations.

Compared to these gameplay bugs, the visual glitches seem trivial by comparison, but it's still worth mentioning that Blood Bar Tycoon can look messy at times. Characters clipping through the environment is usually a forgivable sin, but here it happens all the time, with visitors to your bar constantly walking through doors, tables, and other patrons. Two customers will often shamble into the bar weirdly stuck together like puppets whose strings are tangled together. Minions and customers sometimes get physically stuck to bits of the environment, with the only way to free them being to demolish the object they are stuck to.

The developers pushed out several updates during my time with the game, but even after the updates I still had frequent problems. I can't help but think that Blood Bar Tycoon needed more time in development and more playtesting to get it ready for a full release. It's a real shame, because the basic concept here is clever and unique, and when the bugs backed off I was able to see how the experience could be quite fun. As it stands, I have to recommend you don't invite Blood Bar Tycoon into your life, otherwise you might get a nasty shock.