RS2 News (Mar 2018)

We're into March (although you wouldn't know it when I look out the window!) and it's time for another round-up of the latest goings-on in Restaurant Story 2. Since my last update we've seen one cruise event come and go, another bring something a little different, and Lani with her predictable goals, as ever.

But before all that I'd like to briefly discuss a new version of the sequel title on iOS. Released on 8th February, the App Store promised 'bug fixes' and 'performance improvements' had been implemented. In fairness to Storm8 I can't actually think of what these could possibly consist of given that there aren't really many glitches currently in the game, at least from my experience.

App update for iOS in App Store

To date I've only downloaded the update on my secondary device (always very wary of things going wrong with updates!) and have found just a couple of noticeable changes. First of all the Social and Messages window icons have been shifted from the top of the screen to the bottom right corner next to the Market button. Not sure what this achieves, but it certainly takes a little time to get accustomed to.

The second change is the introduction of the free gems feature which has been added to Restaurant Story (and other Storm8 titles) in recent weeks and months. I don't think I ever got round to mentioning it on here for the original game, but this is a feature run by an outside company which gives players the opportunity to earn premium currency by completing a variety of tasks, ranging from watching trailers and completing surveys to downloading other apps and making deposits.

This certainly opens up more ways to earn additional gems, if you can be bothered. I've found it to be a slightly cumbersome system and had a bad experience with it in Restaurant Story early doors when not receiving a reward for one of the tasks where the goal was to reach a particular level in another game. Of course you can always drop an email to the provider to try and resolve the situation, but life it too short.

Luckily the classic free gem videos remain available on iOS, so we do still have that avenue for earning more gems which then can't be spent on anything useful!

To some of the recent events then, starting with the Winter Olympic themed cruise event. Aligned with the real thing in Pyeongchang, at first glance it seemed quite exciting that we were getting a cruise centred on a current event. However it soon became apparent that the gamemakers had just reused the content from the Rio 2016 cruise - and that was a summer Games! Recycling is obviously standard practice these days in Restaurant Story 2, but I felt that this was a particularly nasty instance of it.

Main window for Winter Olympics themed cruise event

A poor performance in the last couple of days meant that I looked set to miss out on a medal, but a flurry of 60 quick serves and 37 gems (the latter mostly spent on forcing the restock of Peppers which were insistent on cropping up again and again!) meant that I did eventually make the podium.

The final prize was the Go for the Gold Cookies, located on the Jubilee Oven. In line with the rest of the cruise, Miguel from the 2016 edition was back again, providing the Torch which I'd already accumulated over 1000 of in the two-and-a-half years since its introduction. The cookies call for 8 Torches, 2 European Butter and 2 Sugar with the middle one of those a stamp ingredient. Always a mark against a recipe for me - I'll never master all these stamp oriented prize dishes!

Before we got to the next cruise event there was a batch of stamp goals from Lani. This was actually her second lot of the month, and I'm pleased to report that I completed five out of the six she offered up in February. The only one I didn't partake in was the one yielding two silver stamps in the second batch given that this requested the Grilled Gold, a European Butter hungry recipe. I'm so tight on the use of the stamp ingredients that I even refresh them in the early days of the cruises!

 RS2 News

 03/02/18 February 2018
 13/01/18 January 2018
 02/12/17 December 2017
 04/11/17 November 2017
 14/10/17 October 2017

Now to the current event which concludes this weekend. The Lunar New Year cruise event was released in the early hours of last Saturday morning UK time, which meant that I wasn't able to kick it off until after reset time. The result of that is a Monday finish for me which will probably mean a not so pleasant quick serve and gem spend.

We're battling for right to have Barktholomew Chowington (it is the year of the dog after all!) visit our restaurants and deliver the Red Packet, with this special ingredient feeding into the Golden Dumplings on the Celebration Stove. There's good news regarding this dish - the stamp ingredient it devours is Duck Eggs, which being the main drop from bronze stamps is much easier to come by. I have 125 in the pantry at the time of writing!

But the real success story of this cruise lies with the side goal chain. Usually this is a monotonous and dull string of steps with a gold stamp awaiting at the end of it, but not this time. We have a new ingredient! The Paper Lantern is a time limited addition to the General Store with a 2 hour refresh time. It's been a long wait for a new ingredients so this is a real treat!

General Store including Paper Lantern

The Paper Lantern is among the necessaries for the Auspicious Fish on the Diner Stove and the Prosperous Spring Rolls on the Diner Oven, both new recipes which are around for a limited time. It's great to see new dishes added outside of the two prize appliances again and greater still that the only other ingredients they need are Eggs and Tomatoes. This makes for a relatively easy challenge running alongside the cruise, especially given that the mastery requirements of both are not all that high.

The only negatives I can pull from these side goals is that there's a decoration reward at the end rather than a valuable gold stamp, and Paper Lanterns are a prize on three of the 10 days of the cruise, thus meaning fewer stamp opportunities. However this is balanced out by the fact that day eight is providing four gold stamps, which may be unprecedented.

It's fair to say that I am pretty happy with this current event. And I haven't said that in a long time. That makes it all the more baffling that I'm well behind schedule having just finished day seven halfway through what is my day eight! But hopefully we see more invention in the coming weeks as it has certainly brought me out of my Restaurant Story 2 stupor.