Simulation games offer some of the most interesting experiences, and if they are really good will either captivate my attention for a while or actually manage to teach me something. When I first found out about this title, Arcadecraft just seemed like heaven to me. I mean, who didn’t want to run their own arcade?

Simulator games either mostly rely on you going through endless menus and options, or actually organising your business real time. Arcadecraft is the latter. In Arcadecraft, your main goal is very simple, build a popular arcade and make sure it runs enough to cover your bank loan. However, the game isn’t all about picking and placing new machines then just collecting the money, as you have to get involved, in a really interesting “kick your customers out if they bang on your machines” way.

Basically, you start with one location, where you can buy and place your arcade cabinets. When you do, there are some tips that tell you to put it in a specific way for them to be truly effective. After that you just have to wait and hope that customers will come in and actually play them. After each month ends, your expenses get cut from your income and unless you just love the idea of going bankrupt, you better have enough to cover them. The expenses will depend on how many machines you have and how much electricity they use.

Other than the arcades, you can place either a vending machine or a jukebox as well. Furthermore, depending on what time of the year it is, you can buy some decorations. Now, the decorations part isn’t intensive at all, and you just either get a pumpkin for Halloween or a tree for Christmas. The developers are actually promising more content in the future, which makes me wonder why they didn’t go the early access route? At least they could have provided updates with feedback in real time. Even the design of your arcade is limited to a few tweakable colour options, and there isn’t much you can do with it at the moment.

Right off the bat, let me just tell you that the game is unfairly hard. It is very rare for a simulation game to actually have balanced difficulty, as it isn’t the easiest thing to do, and due to all these features most developers just end up making, the game isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Well, it is actually, if the park was Satan’s own little playpen.

The tweakable options I do like though are the ones for the cabinets, where you can either switch the difficulty level or change the playing price. However, playing around with them unnecessarily can either cause your cabinets to lose popularity or get punk-ass little kids to start attacking them (more on that later). So you have to be careful how and when you change those settings.

The best part of the game though, is without a doubt the arcadey gameplay. Your machines can fill up with coins, get jammed or have little monsters (kids) attacking them, and for each surprise reaction, you need to take an interesting action. If one of your machines fills up with coins, you have to select it and hold either the right mouse button or the space key to empty it. You won’t get any of the cash spent on the cabinet until you actually empty them. Later in the game, presuming you do make it to the later sections, the game gets extremely hard and you can hire staff to help you empty the cabinets instead. Now, if your machine gets jammed, it is even more fun to solve that problem. How this will work is that you have to hover over it, pick it up, drop it, then pick it up again, and drop it once more. Basically, ramming the bejeezus out of it until the coin slot gets unjammed. Due to the crunchy sound effects, these tiny actions feel very satisfying.

Now, coming on to the main problem, those bratty kids. Every once in a while, some wise-ass will come to your arcade, all bottled up with weird feelings, probably from hitting puberty on the head too hard, thinking that beating the heck out of your poor machines is absolutely the best counselling anyone can provide, not to mention, cheap (for them). To stop them from living out their sick teenage fantasies or whatever acts they saw on the cool douchebag channel last night, you have to pick them up and drop them by the exit, politely telling the ungrateful bastards to scram. If you don’t do so in time, they will break your machines and hit the road faster than Lindsay Lohan hits cocaine. Bastard magicians.

If unfortunately, you do get your machines broken, you’ll have to pay to get them repaired. You’ll also need to pay to have your vending machines refilled when they eventually run out of drinks. Anyways, coming back to the arcadish gameplay, every once in a while you will see a golden lit up tile with a star on it, which if you place your cabinet on, will raise its popularity. You can strategically raise prices then though, as it won’t affect the popularity of your cabinet for the duration of the bonus period. Just be sure to lower the price again before the bonus tile fades away as your lucky tile would have then gone to waste, and boy can the popularity change fast.

There are also some events that happen, where someone will come to visit you. It will be either a foreign salesman or a pro player that wants to take a shot at setting one of your games record. With the foreign salesman, you can either buy their import cabinets or not, and with the pro players you can either decline them or let them try. If your pro player does succeed, it will raise the popularity of the cabinet he set a record on; otherwise he will walk away a sore loser having hogged your cabinet for his own selfish purposes. Also, they only seem to be interested in your popular machines, lazy morons.

Come to think of it, one thing I really would like the game to stop doing is shoving brand new arcade machines in my face. With its difficulty it is pretty much just taunting me, “Hey loser… you see this? This is awesome, this is new. You don’t have money, so you don’t get to have a new toy. Now go cry in a corner while the little brats beat up your old and so totally out of date machines.” I mean come on, if that isn’t enough, douchebag game companies can’t stop releasing the cabinet versions of the game on home consoles. Now I know how evil Sony, Atari and Nintendo truly are, all those lives they have destroyed.

Another thing that really irks me is how the game just tells you to start saving up for your loan repayment out of nowhere. Now, if it was a sensible business, the monthly expenses would include money that you should put away to repay the debt at the end of two years, but NOOOOPE, sensibility be damned, here are more bratty kids instead. Also, what kind of simulator doesn’t have a fast-forward function?

Even with some really fun gameplay features, the game is severely lacking in content and not to mention, the steep difficulty curve. For £9.99 I don’t think I can recommend it at this difficultly and lacking state. I hope future simulation developers will pay more attention to especially the smaller details, in order to have a balanced difficulty. At least have a proper tutorial to tell us how to beat the game, or give some useful tips once in a while.  If you want to earn extra stress levels and section yourself to Lindsay Lohan’s rehab clinic, then Arcadecraft could be for you.  Otherwise either avoid or wait for a timely price-drop.

Do you want reveal the Review Score?