Review of Flash Game: Donut Empire

One thing I remember from my early game playing days in the 90's is that there were a lot more business Sim style games. Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Sim City, Transport Tycoon. These games had sequels and imitators but the emphasis in gaming during the 00's went more towards ultra realistic graphics and only recently seems to have changed to games from independent studios concentrating more on gameplay than visuals. Both trends seemed to overlook the fun you can have from building a working business from the ground up.

Fortunately for the nostalgic side of me there seem to be a few Tycoon style games emerging in the flash game market. One of these which came out recently is Donut Empire. The aim of the game is to customise your donut stall in such a way that it attracts more customers which in turn allow you to upgrade your empire with fancy features such as seating and heating.

The game reminds me of the minigame in theme park where you could build burger and drinks stands and then individually set the price and ingredient levels such as salt or sugar. It does seem a bit of a shame that so many years on flash games are only at the stage of complexity where they are matching minigames from the Amiga but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and see this is the start of something much bigger which will perhaps mean new generations of gamers can experience the full joy of the 90's games via their Browsers.

The graphics are very well put together and its obvious that the developer used trained artists and didn't simply attempt to hack together some random graphics which all too often is the downfall of new flash games made by a single person. The sound is ok but a bit random, at times I thought I had accidentally opened a new browser somewhere as the sudden music change didn't fit the tone of the game and my brain assumed it must have been coming from a popup somewhere. But like most looping music it fades into the background once you play enough.

Hints and Tips:

Make sure the pay attention during the initial tutorial, the game is simple at first glance but has a lot of intricate settings
play around with altering 1 thing at a time to see what its affect is on customers, once you feel you have a decent knowledge of the donut industry start your mission again and put it all into good use together.

Experiment with which upgrades are worth their money, some of them attract more customers for what they cost than others.