Game update: 01/02/18

Late last night Valentine's descended upon Restaurant Story...

Notification for Chocolate Maker goals

And there's no better way to please your loved one than some sweet choclate! Yes, less than a week after I pulled up Storm8 for some dodgy spelling they're at it again, and this time in a goal notification!

Looking beyond that initial mishap, this is a five day flash quest, so I recommend that you get straight to it. My dedicated post here provides all the details.

Essentially we are fighting for access to three new recipes located on the Chocolate Maker as well as a much coveted floor decoration from yesteryear. The Chocolate Maker was original introduced way back in 2012 and received a re-release in 2013. I don't believe it's appeared since, so right from the off there's a great opportunity for a large contingent of the playing population to obtain the existing recipes on this cooker.

Except it only had one. For five years the Chocolate Hearts have spent Valentine's Day alone, but not this year! Finally this long forgotten dish has company and that really pleases me. There are quite a few appliances out there which were released in the earlier years with a solitary recipe, and these are the ones the gamemakers should be targeting the most for these short goals.

So what are the three new additions to the Chocolate Maker?

New recipes on Chocolate Maker

There's no getting away from it - these are about as lazy as they come with respect to design. Essentially the three new entries are just a simple re-colouring of the existing 8 hour Chocolate Hearts, which is hugely disappointing but not at all surprising given recent trends.

Could the two leaves have been shifted around? Maybe rearrange the hearts on the plate? Or how about a different colour of plate for each one? Do all of those and you've got a threesome that each look at least slightly different. Instead it's just copy and paste in action.

But of course the proof is in the ratings:

Toffee Hearts
Profit	XP gain	Portions	Profit per plate	Availability	Rating
2	2	1	10	5	2.8

Cordial Hearts
Profit	XP gain	Portions	Profit per plate	Availability	Rating
?	?	?	?	5	?

Be Mine Hearts
Profit	XP gain	Portions	Profit per plate	Availability	Rating
?	?	?	?	5	?

At this time I've only been able to find the statistics for the Toffee Hearts, although I could have a guess at the others - the Toffee Hearts are identical to the Chocolate Hearts in every way, and I do know that the other two are also 8 hours in duration. So I'm fully expecting all three of the additions to have the same numbers.

So that's another strike against the game's developers regarding their laziness. I've said it countless times, but how hard can it be to make a little adjustment to the profit, portions and XP each time, as well as the duration? It just adds to the growing monotony of the game.

And just to make things worse, the figures are really poor. Only five of the 87 dishes of 8 hour length score lower overall than this lot (assuming they are all identical stats wise) which places them firmly in the master and ignore category.

Fortunately we do still have a final prize to discuss, and for this goal set it is the Kissing Swans. A 4x4 sized piece, this is a marbled pond within which two swans are... kissing. It's a beautiful item and probably one of the best Valentine's has yielded down the years in Restaurant Story. You have to go back to 2013 for its first appearance when it was priced at 30 gems. So the opportunity to get it now without a gem spent is one not to be missed!

Kissing Swans

Of course I bought it in 2014 so am left pondering whether I really need a second. It could be a nice decoration to use symmetrically, but on balance I'll probably call it quits when I get to the final step and have all of those wonderful recipes unlocked.

In conclusion, Storm8 are lazy. The only real positives with this goal set are the Chocolate Maker being given some much needed additions (albeit awful ones on the numerical front) and the much coveted Kissing Swans being made available to everyone, and effectively for coins. Not Storm8's finest effort - I'm hoping for something more exhilarating from the full-length Valentine's goals...