Published: Monday, 20th July, 2009 1:50pm

Restaurant Empire 2

by Narin Bahar

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PC

Being a celebrity chef seems fairly straightforward nowadays. Back in the day you used to have to be able to, yannow, cook. Now it's more about being able to swear like a trooper (Gordon / Jamie) or pout alluringly into the camera while making innocent vegetables look dodgy (Nigella). But it's not as easy as it looks, as Restaurant Empire 2 proves.

The Sims meets Masterchef (but with less talk of desserts you could swim in), Restaurant Empire 2 lets you take your rightful place at the centre of the culinary universe, building, cooking, choosing your suppliers, buying your food, hiring and firing your way to the top of the gastronomic tree.

A lot of the usual elements of tycoon / sim type games are here - arrange and decorate your restaurant, set your prices, manage your staff, and watch the money (hopefully) roll in. You can have different styles/types of cuisine, although the idea you'd have American, French, Italian and German yet no British is a little disappointing. Ok, I'll concede that fish and chips and chicken tikka masala and roast dinners are only going to get you so far - but our culinary merits must at least equal Germany's, surely?

Having not played the original game, I was interested to see if there was a steep learning curve. Thankfully not, if you've played any of these games before it's fairly intuitive and well laid out, even before the first couple of tutorial missions.

So you pick your decor (the better it is the more your patrons will enjoy the ambience), buy your kitchen gadgets and pick your menu. You can hire new chefs or buy recipes to expand your culinary repertoire and there's lots of stuff to try and unlock.

Occasionally the AI is a bit glitchy - the frustration of being penalised for waiters being stuck trying to deliver plates of food is quite annoying when it's that they're incapable of walking past each other - but overall there is enough here to get many many hours of play from this game. If you're a fan of the genre this is a worthy addition to your collection, plus the budget price won't leave a sour taste in the mouth either.

Four stars.