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Chocolatier
Oh the gloriously rich and delectable life of a chocolatier! Constantly surrounded by mounds of chocolate bars and boxes of mouth-watering truffles! Build your empire one ingredient at a time as you travel the world to find the best prices and buy factories to maximize production! Manage your output and please your customers, but don't forget about those conniving competitors who hope you fail! Do you have what it takes to conquer the world through chocolate? Find out in Chocolatier!
This game was engrossing and addictive from the get-go. It's goals were clearly identifable while employing entertaining worldwide travel. Not many games entice me the way the Chocolatier did. I had many marathon nights and enjoyed the story line that accompanied the goals. I thoroughly enjoyed the manufacturing aspect combined with selling the products in each port to build my empire. This game far surpassed my expectations.
This review has an average score of 4.3 - Based on 9 ratings Login to rate this review
funnlim's Review - June 16, 2007
Demo Version (PC)
Overall:
Graphics:
Sound:
Gameplay:
Play and play and play and never be bored!
I have very fond memories of a game I once had where I played as Marco Polo, traveling around the world, buying spices, selling, trading and running errands for Kublai Khan.
The setting is basically a huge map, static characters with typed dialogues. The goal is to be rich and in that game, I played so well, I was very rich at the end of it. It also had a cool soundtrack suitable for the era.
After playing Chocolatier for just 10 min, it brought back those fond memories. I could play this game forever. You will encounter various characters asking you to buy and sell stuff, in this game chocolates.
You will get new recipes, buy the ingredients at various ports where you can haggle the price, make the chocolates by playing a mini shoot and score game and in the end buy factories and become a mogul of chocolates.
The characters are static, this is not an RPG game where your character is seen. You will see a picture of a port, which at first can be quite confusing since you don't know which building is which, you have a small message panel that will tell you what you bought/sell, your mission and and the errands to run. You can then click the map and travel the world in search of more ingredients and recipes.
After the short but useful tutorial, you're basically on your own which can be quite daunting since there is no intro to the towns but check out the occasional messages, it can contain useful info on cheap ingredients to buy and at which port. The graphics are lovely, the chocolates look delicious, the map convincing and the music, the best of the lot is a suitable companion piece to this game. If you have played that Marco Polo game I mentioned, this is the game for you because it is almost 100% like it, except for the era. It would be nice if the Queen/King of England sends my character on an errand. Someone recognizable but thus far, the characters are fictional.
All in all, a wonderful game which you can play for a very long time without feelin
This review has an average score of 4.3 - Based on 46 ratings Login to rate this review
bandyworlds' Review - June 16, 2007
Demo Version (PC)
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Graphics:
Sound:
Gameplay:
Overwhelming
Combine mouthwatering graphics with truly innovative gameplay, and you've barely begun to describe what makes Chocolatier one of the best games I've seen on this site. I'm not a fan of real chocolate, but the beautiful illustrations actually made me want a piece.
While the sound did not grab me enough to make me turn off my own music player, the gameplay made up for it in spades. My one complaint is that the possibilities are, as this review's title states, overwhelming. I found it rather easy to forget objectives and the random factor in obtaining them was occasionally irritating. But overall, abundance of content in a game is hardly much of a flaw.
Anyone who likes mercantile games along the lines of those in the Tradewinds series will love this one. Especially if that series left them longing for a bit more complexity.
This review has an average score of 4.2 - Based on 36 ratings Login to rate this review
When you get the message that Evangeline wanted to see you, drop everything else and go see her! Most of the time, it is important, you can get promoted, and new ports to explore, or you can get new request that will give you more recipes.
Buy as much ingredients as you can, especially in the first minutes of the game. And don't travel as much, because you'll be out of money before you have enough chocolates to sell.
But do go to EVERY house in the town you're in, cos you'll never know when someone is gonna give you their recipe.
Buy new factory as soon as you get enough money foir it, and the new machine (for example, you have machine for bars, now you buy machine for squares). When you have ALL of the factories, arrange them to make as much varities of chocolates as you can, just to have enough to sell for money to buy new ingridients.
And, it's better to make chocolates with ingredients that you have in town for buying. For example, make coffee chocolates in Rio, cos you don't have to travel to get coffee, and you're not going to spend money for it, so you'll be able to buy more coffee.
Always have at least 1000 units of cacao beans and 1000 units of sugar, and you'll never be out of ingredients.
Change your recipes at the factories every few months to keep high chocolate prices. Because if you carry on with the same chocolates, your customers will get bored and the prices will be really low!
First,go to every city,and visit every house,every market,every shop,every place.
The people give to you recipes,but they want some cases of the recipes back.
Ex:Felix Baumaster will give you recipes,but he wants ____ cases of that recipe
If you are on a quest, better hurry up to finish it, because as long as you are on a quest, whoever you meet, they all keep giving you the same dialog. But once you are quest-free, they can give you lots of new information, quests, recipes...
It is my personal experience that if you have an ingredient that you are not using (eg you buy bling cherries even before you're making Chocolate Cherry Squares or you stopped making them) then the game will steal them! That's not fair! You paid good money for that! So my tip is to don't buy anything you don't immediately need. And if you have plenty of something try to finish it out, so your money won't go to waste. When a factory is stalled, instead of buying more of an expensive ingredient, you can change recipes. Even if something is profittable, producing it for to long can bore consumers. So it's best to change. At least, you used out all the expensive ingredients.
Here are the locations of certain ingredients. The game only tells you the last place you saw it. This way you can see all the places and you can choose your location accordingly. So instead of going far away, you could go closer. The prices of ingredients vary everywhere and every week so it is impossible to say which place is cheapest at what time.
Sugar - Everywhere
Milk Solids - Everywhere
Cacao Beans - Trinidad
Merida,
Accra,
Mahajanga,
Quito
- Colombo
- Sulawesi
Cashew Nuts - Trinidad
Merida
Mahajanga
Almonds - San Francisco
- Rio de Janeiro
- London
- Mahajanga
- Colombo
- Hong Kong
- Sulawesi
Coffee Beans - Rio de Janeiro
- Accra
- Istanbul
- Hong Kong
- Sulawesi
Mint Leaves - New York
- London
- Accra
- Istanbul
- Quito
If you're working in factory on a new chocolate recipe, and the machine goes too fast...
...just put one ingredient in a place it doesn't belog and it slows down. For example, you need one sugar and two cacao beans, and the machine goes really fast (it does when you get right every "plate"), but the next ingredient that is coming is another cacao bean. Send it to the "plate" you've already finished, and that will slow down a bit you machine, so you'll be able to make more chocolates
