Paradise Beach

With autumn fast approaching, people who could not enjoy a well-deserved holiday in the sun are able to make up for it virtually by playing Paradise Beach, the latest creation by developer Astargames. In this building simulation you can get along without sunburn and expensive cocktails, but it certainly has its own catch. In a niche setting represented by popular titles such as Coconut Queen it is hard to stand out, but Paradise Beach does not have to dread any comparison.

As an up-and-coming manager it is your task to create beautiful and entertaining beach resorts on various islands. Supported by Mr. Gates and his granddaughter Emmy, the player will learn what it takes to design sites of relaxation and fun, where people can really experience their dream holiday. While the game omits the usual materials, you will have to keep an eye both on your account balance and how much energy is left for new facilities.

By building and upgrading ice cream stands, showers, cafés, and spas; planting more than a dozen sorts of trees and flowers; or adding sand castles, statues and fountains, you create beach resorts that’s as close to the visitors expectations as possible. Except for natural obstacles, such as rocks and small ponds, you can build anywhere. This trend to not restrict the player with only a small number of building sites is very welcome, because it makes games more complex and interesting, although this more “hardcore” approach might not appeal to every casual player. However, you still have to worry about space in another context.

This mainly derives from the constant and realistic interaction between the player and the resort’s visitors. These highly demanding visitors leave trash on every empty spot if you don’t add enough trash bins to the resort, and sometimes they are drowning and you have to react quickly to save them. On other occasions mischievous vandals will try to damage your facilities, or some guests will desperately beg you to find their phone or their towel which they lost during their visit.

Some of these tasks you can pass on to your staff members as soon as you hire them. The engineer will care about broken or damaged facilities, the custodian will empty full trash bins and remove banana peels or cans, the life guard will save people from drowning, and the security guard will throw out vandals. This is where the matter of space becomes important: every staff member is only responsible for a specific area, so that it is important to arrange facilities close to each other, and to make use of the staff members’ sphere of influence effectively.

The visitors of your beach resorts are extremely picky and sensitive – each visitor is individually responsive to his personal experience that depends on a variety of factors, this being the cleanliness of the island, the vegetation, how long they have to wait at the ice cream stand, the cafe, or various other facilities and whether there are enough showers or lounge chairs. This adds a lot of depth to the game, but unfortunately Paradise Beach lacks specific statistics.

The general mood of a visitor is indicated by a green, yellow, or red emoticon in a thought-bubble above his or her head. By clicking on this thought bubble, every visitor will tell you why he currently likes or dislikes your beach resort, but even with those clues it is hard to tell what the player can change or add to make a positive difference in the visitor’s rating. Constant alerts of annoyed or drowning visitors, vandals, an account balance which is changing faster than the national debt, and securing the provision of enough energy require the player’s attention and a lot of strategic thinking.

Fortunately Paradise Beach game features an untimed campaign. Ambitious players can try to finish any level in expert time, but to proceed you just have to meet all the goals of a level, the time does not matter in this respect.

The graphics are really detailed and all the holiday guests bustling around are a joy to look at, especially when the screen is dominated by green smileys. The individual interaction with the visitors creates a very exceptional experience, which cannot be compared to any other game in the casual market. While other building simulations depend strongly on fast-clicking and construction tasks, Paradise Beach introduces a new and welcome complexity, which involves individual visitors, strategic thinking in various directions and the classic elements of this genre at the same time.

Altogether Paradise Beach is a must-have for building simulation fans who are longing for a real challenge, while it is probably a no-go for people who prefer less complex games where it is not absolutely vague what you have to do to proceed in the game. Besides and certainly of major importance is the fact that the game is not a simple copy of an already existing game, but rather unique enough to provide an alternative and interesting gaming experience.

Review by David Becker

Tourist Trap

A town with $1 million in debts surely does sound familiar to a lot of people nowadays. Accumulating debt is very easy without a doubt, but what can be done to pay them back? What is still a mysterious question in reality is absolutely no problem in Tourist Trap, the new building simulation by developer Zemnott. But while the idea of building attractions sounds fun, Tourist Trap turns out to be as exciting as looking for a needle in a haystack.

Your main task is to return the town of Kitschville to former glory, supported by a lot of bizarre and over-the-top characters who will provide you with new plans for attractions, amenities, and municipal buildings. You will be notified about new building plans by a light bulb above the city council, where fourteen consultants will present to you new buildings which will please their personal favorite demographic group.

The basic steps of Tourist Trap could not be easier. With the money on your account you can construct all the buildings, each of them attracting a different group of visitors of which there are five, namely families, truckers, college students, senior citizens and business professionals. Here the game’s lack of any complexity clearly shows, because the endless possibilities of customer groups with different interests is barely used at all.

You can decide on your own when to build which attraction or amenity, thereby vaguely influencing how many new visitors of a specific group you are going to attract. The attractions are actually fun, the “World’s Biggest Cowboy Boot,” the “Giant Robot,” “Peggy’s Peach Palace” or the “Briefcase Museum,” to name but a few. But apart from look and name, the buildings do not differ greatly. Attractions cannot be upgraded, in contrast to Amenities, whose upgrades simply extend the number of tourists they can accommodate.

Every building has to be connected to the highway by a path, and buildings for business professionals even need a paved road. Sometimes a hammer will appear over certain buildings, which simply means that they need repair quickly. The longer you wait with this, the more damaged they will become, and the more money you will have to pay for the repair. Even worse are fires, because you not only have to send a fire engine, but have to repair the building afterwards, too.

Unfortunately Tourist Trap game feels like an extremely light versions of similar available titles. The option to activate advertisement surely is a good idea, but with only three billboards to boost the popularity of specific attractions with only a very small effect just does not feel like a full and interesting feature. Furthermore you can construct every building where you want to, and add a great variety of rocks, trees and even a pond to change the landscape, which is basically a good thing and sounds engaging. But practically the game fails again to make good use of this potentially promising idea.

While it is vaguely stated that the addition of trees boosts the appeal of any attraction, you don’t actually have to care about that anyway, because even without this bonus appeal the game still is much too easy. In around two or three hours you will have created every possible attraction and collected the required amount of money to repay the debts of Kitschville. And what you are doing in the meantime cannot be called diversified at all – waiting for money, repairing buildings and blowing out fires, and those limited actions in a much slower pace than in similar titles.

Every once in a while you will get special challenges, for example to keep fifty senior citizens for three cycles at Kitschville, or to accumulate a certain amount of money within 30 cycles to extend the land on which you can build. Occasionally you will have to pay for uncommon expenses, or get some bonus money from generous donors, but even those small surprises are few and far between, and definitely not enough to rise the overall appeal of the game itself.

Another significant weakness of Tourist Trap are the graphics, which are as monotonous and sluggish as they can be. The buildings and the landscape are less detailed as those of similar titles, and you spend the whole campaign on the same map, which is not exactly adding any diversity. Of course it is at least something that some of the attractions are animated, but where are the tourists? The game is called Tourist Trap, the attractions display that you definitely have tourists, but Kitschville looks absolutely deserted, there is not a soul to be seen anywhere.

With that said, waiting and collecting money is not exactly what most gamers consider playing. There just is not enough to uphold the player’s interest, and instead of getting challenging in the end, Tourist Trap becomes a virtual version of “Waiting for Godot.” If you are really a deep-rooted fan of building simulations it surely cannot hurt to give the trial a whirl, but don’t expect more than a very short and mildly boring pastime.

Review by David Becker

DinerTown Tycoon Review

The management simulation genre is the sort that mostly appeals to detail-oriented folks who enjoy micromanaging things and building up from humble beginnings into super-stardom. Aside from the odd Sim City and Theme Park game, most of these sorts of products aren’t going to attract casual folks. This is mainly because they’re a bit more of a time-investment than someone who only acquires four games a year is going to be interested in bothering with. Diner Dash, on the other hand, is more of a casual gamer’s product: it’s fast, frantic, good for all ages, and generally offers quick, satisfying enjoyment that can be played in small or large doses. DinerTown Tycoon, surprisingly enough, is an attempt to cross-breed those two types of gameplay in an attempt to offer up something with enough micro-management empire-building play to satisfy the management sim crowd while also offering enough fast-paced clicking play for the more casual crowd. While it doesn’t quite succeed at doing enough to completely please both sides of this equation, it’s actually not a bad idea and manages to do just enough to be interesting, if not amazing.

There’s a new food establishment moving into DinerTown by the name of Grub Burger (complete with a smiling grub for a mascot). Grub Burger is the evil corporate empire of the story, and the mayor wants nothing to do with their mass-produced products until he’s convinced to try one, which suddenly and astonishingly changes his mind. This is because of Ingredient X, the secret ingredient in Grub Burgers that makes them tasty and, incidentally, makes them glow neon green. Yep. So Grub Burger moves into town and completely takes over the food service industry until Flo and company decide to take the town back by way of making the best food possible to sway public opinion. The story is explained in little comic book cutscenes between sessions. While it’s basic and completely stereotypical (The evil corporation is evil, their food is horrible, and Ingredient X is bad stuff. The usual.), it’s cute enough to keep things going and does what it needs to do.

Visually, DinerTown Tycoon is simple but charming. The cities and characters are bright and colorful, and everything looks cute and happy. Even the bad guys are charming, though they’re designed in such a way as to be shadowy evildoers, so it’s a menacing kind of cute. The visuals are simplistic, which is both good and bad. On one hand, the simplistic designs are charming on their own way, but on the other, they’re also not really anything fantastic technologically speaking, and they all kind of run together after a little while. The audio is in much the same position. The tracks are cute and fit the tone of the game well, but it gets a bit repetitive as a lot of the songs are re-used in multiple sections of the game. Unfortunately the music isn’t anything outstanding or attention-catching on its own. Both the visuals and the audio do the job they’re intended to do, nothing more, and while that isn’t a bad thing, it isn’t a great thing, either.

The gameplay in DinerTown Tycoon is one part resource management and one part frantic clicking, but it’s easy enough to adjust to after a few minutes. At the start of each day, you restock your ingredients, purchase your recipes, buy ads or new restaurants, and generally prep your business for that day. Once done, you start your day and watch as the teeming masses pour forth to buy from your restaurants, monitor their responses and collect their tips. At the end of the day, you’re shown how many of each type of person visited your restaurants that day, as well as how far away Grub Burger is from taking complete control of the area. Your goal is always the same: serve X number of each customer type to take back control of the city from Grub Burger. The amounts of people and types of customers you’ll see in each area differ in tastes from location to location, which makes learning their tastes paramount to your success, as does managing your resources and money appropriately. This might all sound a little confusing at first, but honestly, it’s not hard to work around after you get used to it, as most of the interface is quite streamlined and easy to navigate.

Starting out each day, you’ll be hopping between four screens. The first screen shows you your customer’s served and Grub Burger’s overall performance, both to show you how close you are to winning AND losing. From here you can also buy market research for each customer type, to see what ingredients they like best so as to better entice them to buy from you. The next screen shows you the daily news, to give you an estimated customer turnout, the desirable ingredient of the day, and the Chef’s Challenge, which you can try to accomplish to slow down Grub Burger’s progress. The third screen type allows you to manage your restaurants, and you’re given a different management screen for each restaurant you own. You’ll be able to view each restaurant’s general statistics (chef name, items sold, customers unhappy, etc.), their menus, their decorations and your general ingredient inventory, which is shared between all of your restaurants. You can buy new recipes and decorations from this section, which will help you attract customers to your restaurant. New recipes will attract people who like the ingredients in the dishes you serve, while new decorations will attract more people in general. Every time you buy a new recipe, you’ll have to buy the ingredients you need for that dish, and at the end of every day you’ll have to re-stock for the next day, or re-stock MORE if you sold out of something. You can also dictate the price of each item on the menu of each restaurant, meaning you can charge less for unpopular items or charge more for items that are in high demand that day, in case you want to try and earn a little extra dough. The final screen shows you the neighborhood and allows you to buy new restaurants and advertisements (mobile and stationary) that can entice customers to your shop.

After you’ve finalized your choices for the day, you click to start the day, and that’s when everything speeds up. Customers will start pouring in from all directions to spend their money in one of the restaurants. Depending on your menu for the day, your advertising, and your decoration rating. Your decorations and advertising are fairly straight-forward. Customers will be more likely to be swayed to visit your restaurants if they pass by advertisements or if the restaurant is nicely decorated, and if not, they won’t. The menu, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. Part of your menu appeal comes down to having the in-demand ingredient of the day incorporated into your recipes. If you have recipes that feature this ingredient, people will flock to your restaurant to have some, and if you don’t, they won’t. The other part comes from catering to general customer tastes, meaning that every customer has certain ingredients they like, and having menu items that incorporate those tastes will attract those specific types of customers. Thus, having chicken on the menu on a day when it’s the in-demand ingredient will both attract customers who specifically like chicken AND people looking for the in-demand item of the day, making it readily desirable to have on the menu. As people go to your restaurants, they will either come out happy or unhappy, giving you an indication of how you’re doing. Unhappy customers will either be unhappy with the price of something or will complain that an ingredient is out of stock, and you can move the mouse over them to investigate that complaint. Happy customers will mostly just show up with hearts over their heads, but occasionally will show up with a coin over their head, and a fast click on these customers will earn you a tip for exceptional service. You’ll also occasionally see Flo running around the neighborhood, and a fast click on her will cause her to advertise for you for no charge, though she only shows up randomly. At the end of each day, you’re shown a tally of how many of each customer type you served that day. Every time you satisfy a customer type, they thank you for your existence and give you a gift of either money, ingredients or a new ad type. You’ll then move on to the next day and start over again until you succeed or fail.

There are five sections of the town to liberate from Grub Burger’s grip, and depending on your business management skills and the speed you play at, you should be able to complete all five in about four to six hours. You’ll earn different trophies as you complete various tasks, and you will more than likely have to go through the game a couple of times to earn them all. You can go back to the various locations and play them again as well, so if you liked a particular setup you’re more than welcome to go back and try it again to earn more cash or stomp out Grub Burger faster. The game is mostly quite well balanced from start to finish, and you’ll find that as you progress the challenge ramps up by charging more for ingredients, restaurants and ads, requiring you to wow more customers, and other things. The challenge is by no means oppressive, thankfully, so you probably won’t spend more than two or three tries on a location before you complete it.

Now, despite the fact that DinerTown Tycoon features some simulation management elements, it is not an in-depth simulation management experience. This is both a blessing and a curse as casual players will find the sim experience easy to deal with and manage, but actual fans of the genre will find this a good bit underdeveloped and linear for their tastes. Someone looking for a straight puzzle game might also find it unfriendly trying to manage their cash flow and their recipe prices when all they wanted to do was, well, play something like Diner Dash. The sort of person who kind-of sort-of likes Sim City and kind-of sort-of likes Diner Dash will most likely love DinerTown Tycoon, as it’s a little bit of both mixed together. However it’s hard to recommend to someone who loves one and loathes the other. Also, while it’s nice that you can go back and goof around with the different cities after you’re done, there’s no new variety to be found or higher difficulties to attempt/. This means you’ll just be playing through the same sections over again, which gets boring no matter how cute the presentation.

Frankly, DinerTown Tycoon is interesting and inexpensive enough to be worth checking out if you’re fan of both Tycoon-type games and Diner Dash-type games, but if you’re only a fan of one or the other, or not a fan of either one, you might want to check out a demo first. The product is presented well, simple enough to play without much effort, fun enough to keep your interest and just long and challenging enough to justify the price. It’s kind of hard to recommend to someone who isn’t a fan of management simulation or frantic puzzle games, and there’s unfortunately not nearly enough reason to come back to it once you’ve completed it, but if you’re okay with that, you’ll find that DinerTown Tycoon is a cute, enjoyable experience that’s worth checking out.

Review by Mark B

Chocolatier: Decadence by Design

Having been a fan of the Chocolatier series I was both delighted and disappointed after playing this sequel, Decadence by Design. On one hand, PlayFirst’s latest proved to be a highly polished adventure with challenging gameplay and charming characters and story. But despite a few welcome additions, the gameplay itself is virtually the same as the original, which might let down those anxiously awaiting to see where the developer takes this coveted franchise next.

Like the games that came before it, Chocolatier: Decadence by Design is an economic simulation that challenges players to build up a successful confectionary company. Now set in a post-WWII economic boom, you take over the Baumeister family business from Alex, who sets off to find her missing husband after he failed to return home from the war.

You’ll start off in Zurich, but as with past games in the series, will travel all over the world in search of new recipes, buying ingredients and selling your creations to markets. These tasks usually come in the form of a quest, therefore you’ll be asked by such-and-such to buy XX amount of some ingredient from a person in some town, and you might want to haggle on the price, and then combine the ingredients to create a new product back in Zurich and then deliver to someone in another part of Zurich or the world in order to turn a profit. Characters will often make comments or ask questions related to the Baumeister family, which is a nice addition.

Selling your goods to shops that you own will always net a premium price for your chocolates. You’ll aim to, eventually, take control of major chocolate factories around the world, amass your fortune and distribute your goods around the globe. Some of the 20-odd ports you’ll travel to include Capetown, Tokyo, Toronto, Baghdad, Havana, San Francisco, the Falklands and Belize. You’ll see an Indiana Jones-style map with a little plane flying to each city.

While making chocolates almost always require cocoa beans and sugar, you’ll travel to find great deals on milk, hazelnut, lemon, mint, caramel, coconut, honey and other ingredients to bring to the factory and play the arcade-like mini-game to make your new product. The factories used to make the confections consists of rotating machines, each with a number of slots to house the ingredients. You’ll use the mouse to aim and fire the correct ingredients into each machine, such as shooting two cacao beans and one sugar to create a Dark Chocolate Bar (opposed to a Milk Chocolate Bar that consists of one cacao bean, one sugar and one milk). While it’s not too difficult – that is, until the machines start spinning faster and faster – some economic simulation fans may not want an arcade element in the same game, but I think it breaks up the game-play nicely.

Without giving much away, Chocolatier: Decadence by Design also lets you create coffee concoctions (with a different mini-game that has you fire ingredients to match three identical ones), truffles and infusions, exotic delicacies, and other products. But the real new addition to this sequel is the ability to design and name your own chocolates, and sell them into the marketplace. Players gain access to a secret test kitchen in Iceland, where they can try out experiments by mixing ingredients — such as cocoa, milk, blueberries and honey (“Marc’s Mouthfuls”) — which become part of the game’s recipe book and weaved into the story. Great idea, and it works well as you aim to impress Evangeline Baumeister with a couple hundred cases of your own creation. Too bad you can’t upload your recipe to an online — but in-game — recipe book and download other player’s delights.

Chocolatier: Decadence by Design returns to its roots and proves to be a very entertaining and challenging treat, but this reviewer wishes there were a few more delicious surprises in store. Still, you’ll love this tasty simulation.

Review by Marc Saltzman
Gamezebo, Inc.

Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe

At the risk of sounding cliched, HipSoft has done it again with Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe. Not only does the game offer a fresh set of challenges the third time around, but it continues to succeed in its unlikely quest of making real estate both accessible and fun.

As the name implies, this time around you’re stamping your passport and heading across the pond to Europe, where you’ll spend time in countries like England, Spain and Switzerland helping the locals to spruce up their towns by building new properties like Spanish haciendas, English cottages and Swiss chalets.

Through an intuitive point-and-click interface, accompanied by informative menus that don’t bog you down with too much information at once, you’ll complete the goals laid out by each town liaison to complete the level. These might include building a certain number of houses, raising the town’s curb appeal, and earning a certain amount of total cash or rental income.

Unlike previous games, in Build-a-lot 3 you don’t just spend a chunk of time in one location before moving on to the next. Instead, you really do get your money’s worth out of that passport, using it to jet-set back and forth between countries one level at a time. It certainly helps to keep things interesting.

Some of the most fun features of Build-a-lot 2: Town of the Year are back in Build-a-lot 3, including the ability to paint your house different colors and landscape the yard, both of which add positive curb appeal. You can also build landmarks like hedge mazes that positively affect the curb appeal of the houses around them. Industrial buildings, on the other hand, lower curb appeal, so you have to be careful about where they go.

Curb appeal is taken a step further in Build-a-lot 3 with the introduction of run-down lots. These derelict buildings generate no rental income and have negative curb appeal — in short, they’re what you’d call “fixer uppers.” However, buy one cheap, renovate it, and slap on a new coat of paint and you can sell it at a tidy profit.

Another new feature worth mentioning are the new weather conditions like snow and rain. These not only make the game more interesting from a visual standpoint, but actually affect the speed at which you can do certain outdoor jobs like repairs and painting.

Build-a-lot 3 also introduces various crises that pop up from time to time. When you see a particular icon urgently flashing above a building, it means something’s wrong, and you have to click on it to dispatch the appropriate service to take care of it. If your house is on fire, as is indicated by a flashing smoke alarm, then you’d better send the fire truck out right away. Inconsiderate neighbors playing their music too loudly can be persuaded to turn the volume down by a visit from the police.

If a house is in crisis, you can’t collect rent on it. There’s no way to guard against these random occurrences, although if you build service stations like a hospital or Fire Station at least you won’t have to pay every time you send one out. This adds a nice random element of surprise to the game, and ups the click factor significantly so that at times it’s almost like playing a time management game.

If there’s one thing that can be said about Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe, if you’re waiting around even for three or four seconds, you aren’t playing the game properly. Like its predecessors, Build-a-lot 3 has great pacing that keeps you on your toes and always planning ahead. If it gets too hectic, though, you can always pause the game to collect your thoughts until you’ve worked out a strategy for tackling the level.

At 43 levels, the game is longer than its predecessors, and it seems significantly more challenging as well. Unless you’re a strategy game buff, it’s safe to say that you won’t be getting Expert on every level the first time around. The passport makes it easy to skip to any level you wish to replay, and if you want a break from campaign mode you can head into casual mode. Here, you can play around and take as long as you need, or try to beat the clock and record the fastest completion time.

If there’s a complaint it’s that I miss some of the more colorful mayors and their crazy requests from the previous Build-a-lot games. The characters in Build-a-lot 3 didn’t strike me as being quite so memorable or unique, and seemed there mainly to just introduce the level goals. I guess it’s a case of “you can’t have everything,” because the rest of the game is completely enjoyable.

Many games have tried, with varying degrees of success, to duplicate the real estate/construction strategy gameplay that the original Build-a-lot so deftly pioneered, however none of the imitators have yet to come close to nailing the superb pacing and deep layers of strategy that continue to be hallmarks of this excellent series. Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe included.

Review by Erin Bell
Gamezebo, Inc.

FishCo

Gamers in search of a more challenging digital diversion than mere gem-swapping or hidden object hunting should enjoy FishCo, a fun business simulation that tests your skills as an aquarium owner.

There’s nothing fishy about the game-play, here. You and your business partner, Tracy, must breed, raise and sell freshwater fish and meet many other objectives. In the Action mode, players must accomplish daily goals within a predetermined time limit. One of the 40 levels might ask you to sell 6 Tetras, 4 Sailfins, 3 Cichlids and earn $160 – all within four minutes. Typically, the process would involve buying some eggs, watching the fish hatch and then feeding them the appropriate food (flakes, pellets, worms, etc.) when a small thought bubble tells you they’re hungry. When the tank gets dirty you clean the area. If a fish dies you need to flush it down the toilet. You get the idea.

When your fish grow, and thus increase in value, you sell them to customers (some, as you’ll learn, sell faster than others). You can buy plants and other goodies for the tank to increase the fish’s happiness, as well as change the water or upgrade your filter or light.

As long as you meet the listed requirements, you’ll see some fireworks (think PopCap’s Peggle) and then move onto the next day. Or you can try to play the same level again and reach the Expert score by doing it all faster. Eventually you’ll gain access to five fish tanks in total, learn about 20 unique freshwater fish (click the Almanac for additional info for each!) and while less interesting, place a dozen different plants somewhere in the tank, too.

If you’re growing frustrated with the countdown timer (and your partner will warn you when there’s two minutes left) you can opt for the Relax mode from the main menu, which dispenses with the timer altogether. And hey, you might need some help to reduce the stress of owning an aquarium when you realize your Cichlids are eating all your Tetras and two male Bettas won’t stop fighting if in the same tank!

An unlockable Sandbox mode lets you customize your tank with your earned goodies, such as plants, lights, filters and so forth. The game’s graphics are ok, but nowhere near as good as those aquarium screensavers where the tank, plants and fish look so incredibly real. (Yes, I know screensavers are bad because they consumer energy, not to mention screens don’t need “saving” anymore, but check out the screenshots at ClubAquatica.com.)

Also, FishCo is one of those games that might not appeal to you immediately but gets better as you progress through the levels and take on tougher challenges and unlock more items to play with. On that note, once you complete the main Action mode, there isn’t much of a reason to play it all over again; how cool would it be if the developers as Fugazo released a free level or two every week for registered gamers?

It would also be remiss not to mention some might not be interested in this game-play concept at all – either because they don’t “get” the appeal of business simulations (my wife is one of those) or perhaps the fish theme is unappealing to others. I’m sure Fugazo recognizes this type of game doesn’t have the mainstream interest of, say, a more personality-driven restaurant game like Diner Dash, but FishCo is definitely worth the free trial for those looking for something a little deeper than most casual games.

Review by Marc Saltzman
Gamezebo, Inc.