Restaurant Story 2: The review (part 3)

Time for the final instalment of my big fat review of Restaurant Story 2, where we take an in-depth look at the social aspect of the game.

Title screen for Restaurant Story 2

In principal the social side of the sequel title is much like in the original, but its purpose is less clear. You can still trawl around the community visiting all of the players around the world, leaving tips in your wake and communicating via the wall. Plus there remains the option to add players as a neighbour whom you can then send a gift to daily. But all of these interactions have been modified in RS2, and to be honest generally in a negative way.

We'll start with the process of visiting fellow players' places. The state of play is the same as in RS1, with a random selection of restaurants being listed in the Social window, arranged in descending order of social rating. I've always found this to be a fair way of displaying diners - those who put a lot of effort into travelling around to maintain a high social rating should take priority at the top of the list.

But when you drop by a restaurant, the tipping procedure is frankly rubbish. First and foremost, the tips are not the coins you'd leave in RS1. Instead you leave an incessant sparkling on the tipped table. What is that all about! I guess the sparkles are supposed to catch the attention of the recipient, but I think golden coins can do that adequately!

And if that isn't enough of a let-down, you don't even get to choose the tables you leave the tips. No matter how many free tables there are the ones you're allowed to tip are chosen for you.

Stormie's Diner with tables for tipping chosen automatically

That's completely unnecessary and just adds another needless constraint to the game. To some this issue might seem trivial - not everyone cares where they leave tips but I know that many do like to group there tips together or make a funky pattern. I tend to be that way inclined, so being told where to leave the tips is agitating.

Getting over this gripe, what if I want to add someone as a neighbour? There are now two methods to do this, with the first being the TeamLava tradition of entering a player's Storm8 ID in the invite tab of the Social screen. But there's now a second and much more efficient way of adding players. There is a 'quick invite' option which when tapped immediately sends an invite to a player, bypassing the ID hurdle.

This is quite a cool feature simply because it drops some of the complexity in adding neighbours. And most importantly, it is a feature which can be disabled if you don't want others to be able to add you spontaneously. Just go to the Settings section and toggle off the 'allow quick invites' slider. This is something I've done, not because I'm picky about neighbours, but because of a much greater problem, which will be addressed a little later on...

Now that you've got a new neighbour, it's not uncommon to interact. As in the original game, everyone has a wall which can be posted on, making back and forth conversation nice and easy.

Wall

Except it really isn't. For reasons which are beyond my comprehension, the game's developers made two dreadful decisions. Firstly when at a neighbour's diner, you cannot access your own wall. This can be really frustrating if you're having a lengthy conversation with someone and need to refer back to the comments posted on your own wall.

And another design flaw comes with the inaccessibility of your wall and news feed. In RS1 you can quickly switch between your wall and news feed as they appear in the same window under different tabs, and it can be done whilst at a neighbour's place. In contrast in RS2 it's a shambles. If there is more than one post on your wall that you wish to reply to then you need to either jump back to your own restaurant after the first reply as a kind of bridge to access the second, or remember who the second conversation is with and scan through your neighbour list to find them.

It's a convoluted system which really doesn't work. TeamLava need to address this by blending all the various menus together. We should have your profile page, wall, neighbour list and news feed all under the one banner which can be opened up wherever you are.

In fact the inaccessibility of the wall even extends to when you're just in your own place, at least for me. The wall is viewed by tapping the XP bar in the top left and navigating to the wall tab. By being hidden away like this it is very easy to forget to check it regularly. There have been several occasions when I've not done so and comments from my neighbours have gone unread for days on end!

Now to the art of gifting. In RS1 we have a wide selection of food and parts which can be sent as gifts to all our neighbours. Things couldn't be more different in the sequel game.

Notification for reaching daily gift limit

In RS2 you can only gift a mystery box to your neighbours, and only to three of them per day. The mystery box can contain coins, quick serves or Blueprints, with the last of these being very rare.

What a dreadful set-up! Between construction parts and ingredients, we are always in need of some item, so it makes perfect sense to make at least some of them available to gift. I'd really appreciate being able to give and receive a valuable Wood Plank or onion rather than a few extra coins. Other than the quick serves (which are slow to accumulate) and occasional Blueprints,  I struggle to see the point of gifting in this game, and that's really sad. With so many other limitations in place, surely it wouldn't hurt the gamemakers to allow a more diverse choice when it comes to gifting?

Then there's the most significant point of the social aspect of RS2. It's largely irrelevant. In RS1 you need a certain number of neighbours to make an expansion. And you need neighbours to send the parts required to build constructible appliances. There are no such dilemmas in RS2. Other than exchanging gifts daily, the seriously limited funds produced by tipping are the only benefit to having neighbours. So since you can only send and receive three gifts per day, it's a struggle to justify having more than three neighbours. That's why I have disabled the quick invite option - there's nothing meaningful for the community to gain from having me as a neighbour!

 Restaurant Story 2: The review

 14/02/15 Part 2 - decorating
 31/01/15 Part 1 - cooking

In some ways this doesn't bother me. I don't have the hundreds of neighbours in RS1 that many do, preferring to have a smaller pool of reliable chums who I know that little bit more personally. But in RS2 there almost feels like a deliberate attempt by TeamLava to reduce the interaction element, which is wrong in my opinion - the camaraderie between players is a big part of why I'm hooked to the original game.

So there you have it. There are some major flaws to the social aspect of Restaurant Story 2 which do need addressing. But on balance the game is definitely getting a thumbs up from me. I think the most important thing to do coming into it is not to expect a clone of the original. The game has the same general structure, but there's enough has been added or altered to make it clearly differentiable. And be patient! When there are lots of things expensive or locked early on and you haven't done many upgrades it can get frustrating, but with some patience you can soon start building an award-winning restaurant!