On your marks… get set… bake!
No, this isn’t an episode of The Great British Bake Off, and I’m not Paul Hollywood. Maybe I could be though, with the help of the Bakery Simulator game. I’ve dabbled in the food industry before, thanks to the likes of Cook, Serve, Delicious! and Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator, but this appears to be a more laid back experience. So let’s get handling some buns and hope Bakery Simulator isn’t a soggy bottom of the gaming world.
A baker for hire. That’s essentially your role in Bakery Simulator as you look to supply local stores with your tasty baked goods. A short tutorial guides you through the basics of accepting orders and making a small batch of buns, before leaving you to it. While it’s enough to get through the early days, certain activities involving machines aren’t very intuitive and the Bakerypedia lacks the necessary detail to be of assistance when required.
Initially you can only attempt a single order per day, which doesn’t seem cost effective, but it does allow you to get into the rhythm of baking the average buns and loaves. Measuring out the ingredients into a bowl is easy to follow thanks to the ability to pin the recipe to one side of the screen. Using the mixer and the oven is incredibly straightforward, with only the forming of the bread shape to worry about. That’s where the mini-games of Bakery Simulator begin.
Cutting up the dough into equal amounts is done through a timing-based mini-game in which you must stop a moving indicator whilst it’s inside the green area of a bar. Another sees you rotating a ring to match the shapes up in the correct places and even though this is an easy task, the controls are irritating. Still, there’s nothing too taxing here, and the general feeling after finishing any of the mini-games is that of relief, mostly because they’re lacking in the fun department. Much like the game on the whole to be honest.
Unlike many other food-focused games, Bakery Simulator suffers from blandness in terms of what’s on the menu. The majority of goods are not aesthetically pleasing, nor very adventurous, with buns, muffins, baguettes, and such, doing nothing to increase the enjoyment levels. It’s all quite samey. Fulfilling the orders becomes repetitive too and, eventually, there’s a lot of automation that gives you even less to do.
The life of a baker is incredibly boring, but maybe there’s another side of the process that might up the ante. Step forward the delivery aspect. Indeed, to cut costs you have to go deliver the goods yourself by car, which sounds alright until you get behind the wheel. It’s horrible.
Transported to the city, you’ll see a generic car from a top-down perspective with a little map to show roughly where to go. The city itself is dark and dingy; it’s bereft of life other than the odd vehicle. And handling-wise, let’s just say oversteering is a regular occurrence and the twitchy nature isn’t ideal for navigating any tight gaps. For some reason certain streets are blocked off, often forcing you to take the long way round. That’s fine until it blocks off the only road across a river and you actually have to force your way through a blockade with a very narrow opening. At the end of the day, driving is something that Bakery Simulator could do without.
The progression system is pretty good though, with new rewards earned regularly via gaining XP and levelling up. Whether you get excited by them is up for debate, but there are recipes, ingredients, machinery, bowl upgrades, and more to unlock. Furthermore, there’s a decent loyalty scheme involving those local businesses you’re supplying to. After a set number of orders are completed for each store, perks are given that could increase the amount of XP garnered, let you deliver more items in a day, or provide a discount on ingredients.
Unfortunately, there is a dark cloud hanging over Bakery Simulator – bugs. One bug caused the loss of an entire day’s work as skipping to the next day was the only solution to overcome an inability to deliver an order. The worst however, came upon being able to transport more than a single order per day, which may be coincidental. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t actually deliver the goods, nor hire a courier, and had to delete the save data to start afresh. Without knowing exactly what the issue is, there’s no way to know if and when these problems can reoccur.
Bakery Simulator is the bread bun of the baking world – bland and uninteresting, but some people might still like it. The simplicity and ease in which recipes can be followed is good, while the progression is pretty decent as it keeps introducing new things. Sadly, those things are often boring and the more you unlock, the less input you’ll have in an already uneventful process. Throw in the horrendous driving section, as well as the bugs, and it’s difficult to look past the negatives.
Save your dough and look elsewhere for a good food-orientated simulator.
