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By Manuel  Players: 1 Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Steam Arcade Tycoon is a simulation game that was originally Kickstarted back in 2019, and saw an Early Access Steam release shortly afterwards. It has since received a full release, and will soon be arriving on the Nintendo Switch. I'm a sucker for Tycoon-style games, and have been longing for a new one to play. Naturally that means I'm all over this one, but the real question here is if this game has what it takes to scratch that Tycoon itch. That original Kickstarter was quite the modest one, and it's being worked on by a very small team, but I have high hopes and expectations for this one. With that said, let's skip all the formalities and just get right into it!
Tackling Arcade Tycoon's gameplay is tough, there's more than I could ever hope to cover in a simple review, so I'll try to keep this as simple and to the point as I can. Oh, and if you're wondering why I'm starting with gameplay instead of story, that's because there pretty much is no story. Is that really surprising though? Anyway, as the game's name implies, you're setting out to build and maintain an arcade all your own. This can be done via a set of a dozen campaign levels that have a specific setting and goals, or in an open-ended Sandbox Mode. The campaign levels each have three trophies you must get to "complete" them, and completing them also unlocks the next campaign level. While these stages do have a set ending of sorts, they can be played indefinitely. Sandbox Mode lets you set all the main game parameters yourself, and nothing short of bankruptcy or a game crash can stop your session. You heard that right by the way, there is a way to Game Over here, and it's by staying in the negative for a bit too long. No matter what mode you're playing, building an arcade means setting up token machines and ATMs so customers can give you their money, setting up arcades and other attractions so they can spend all of said money and tokens, and offering them amenities like food and drink stalls so that they have no reason whatsoever to leave your arcade. This is too much work for just one person of course, and you'll need to hire staff to help you run the place. Also, since no one wants to play Pac-Man in an empty room, you'll also want to give the place a lot of personal touches via decorations and colorful wallpaper and floor tiles. If customers are happy, then that means they will spend more money, if not, that means your arcade sales plummet, and everything is about money. That's the overview, now let's get a bit more in-depth.
Arcade Tycoon has two sets of currency, money and stars. Money is self-explanatory, and it's what you use to buy machines, pay staff, pay rent, etc. Stars are used to unlock permanent upgrades to your arcade, and to unlock new (more expensive) machines within each category. Both of these currencies are earned from customers playing games in your arcade, but stars are far more difficult to accumulate early on. You'll find yourself having to decide if you're going to play the long game and make money with a few customers, or go all out and risk every dollar as soon as you get it. If you ever find yourself hurting for either money or stars, you can take on in-game challenges, called contracts, to get a quick boost of both. These contract challenges include tasks like hiring a certain number of employees, surviving a tough in-game event, buying or selling a set amount of items, picking up trash, and so on. If you complete enough of these contracts you'll even unlock unique one-of-a-kind attractions for your arcade. My favorite of these being a Zoltar-esque machine like the one seen in the movie Big. You can also take out a loan if you need some fast money, but it's so hard to pay these back that I don't recommend you ever go that route. There's a lot more gameplay mechanics that are a bit harder to explain too. Machines degrade over time, so you'll need a lot of technicians to maintain and fix them. Sometimes rowdy customers will take out their frustrations on the machines, and might even try to steal, so you'll need security. There's even a (somewhat annoying) power mechanic where you have to constantly make sure you have enough available watts to run your arcade. You will blow a fuse, and might even cause a few machines to explode, if you try to run too many machines over your power limit. Oh, and there's weather to worry about too. You'll want to have plenty of drinks available in hot summers, and you'll want to have a lot of the electricity upgrades in place so storms don't constantly wreck your arcade during the rainy months. There's a lot more of these type of mechanics that I could explain, such as the employee staff room upgrades, but I think you have an idea of what to expect here already.
You can play Arcade Tycoon with as little goals as you want, but it's probably best to keep in mind a few key aspects to maintaining a good arcade. First up is the happiness stat. This always-visible percentage is an average of how happy your customers are, and it's by far the hardest stat to keep up. You'll have to offer a lot of amenities, keep everything affordable, and even keep your arcade clean for this to go above anything other than mediocre. You'll also want to have the best machines available, and maybe even have them all upgraded too. Speaking of which, while most of the arcades machines are pretty much the same beyond cosmetic differences, you can change a lot about how they operate. You can raise and lower how many credits it takes to play them, alter their difficulty to appease customers, and upgrade them to get more out of them in general. The entire happiness algorithm seems a bit hard to crack, as there are times where nothing short of buying more machines will ever raise it. This means that it'll cost you a lot of money to keep people happy, but it's very much worth it as happiness usually pays out in the end anyway. You'll also want to keep an eye out on trends within the Marketing menu. Trends change over time, and you can get lots of money if you learn how to capitalize on them as soon as they change. Modern machines in vogue right now? Better buy lots of them and crank up that token cost to get you the best month of sales possible. Since this is a simulation game, you can see a lot of stats regarding your arcade via the in-game menus. These can show you what your stable of machines are actually pulling in, what customers really think of your arcade, how your profit margins are doing, and even how attractive one section of the arcade is to another. There's a lot of different elements present in Arcade Tycoon, but they really come together to make robust game.
Now that we've outlined most of the gameplay mechanics, let me tell you about the game's biggest drawback: its many, many bugs. Actually, before I get to those, let me mention that the game is just full of typos and grammatical errors throughout. From using the word "Febuary", to just about every arcade's description being wonky as hell, I couldn't help but wish that the entire game went through a fully fluent English-language editor before release. All that nonsense aside, there are far more serious bugs that I experienced during my time with the game. First off are the crashes. This game crashes, a lot. Like Pokémon Scarlet/Violet a lot. Sometimes it happened when I tried to move too many machines in a row, sometimes it happened right after an autosave, sometimes it happened when I bought a particular machine, sometimes it just happened when too much was going on-screen at once. I could never find a single reason for them, but the crashes never stopped coming. Also, my progress in the campaign was completely halted when one of the trophies refused to unlock. Nothing could budge it. I restarted, I played for several in-game decades, and I even resorted to cheating, but I was stuck at a certain point until the developers fixed the issue on their end. That was quite the annoying bug actually, and soured me on the game for a long while. There are also tons of little bugs I noticed too. Some staff perks seem to not work the way they should, getting new expansions in Sandbox Mode can wreck your arcade's appeal, and I found it crazy easy to manipulate most of the game's systems. Hell, I even realized that you could do full Marketing runs (which essentially see you buy ads to increase customer traffic) for no money at all, as long as you have the initial amount in your wallet. I'd almost say that the game was too broken to be playable, but honestly it wasn't. I'll cover this more in-depth in a bit, but many of the issues I experienced I've had have since been fixed. I just want to point out that you are not getting a perfect game here, but it is a fun one. I want to go back to some of the things I really enjoyed before I move on. While I was not able to initially complete all the campaign levels because of the aforementioned game-breaking bug, I really did enjoy the sense of progression they had. Each one has you learn various gameplay mechanics to unlock things, and even introduces new attraction types one at a time so you can get used to them. They can get a bit repetitive after a while, but moving from your literal garage to a giant mall is just a joy I can't put into words. Too bad the surrounding areas of your arcade are always lifeless, empty landscapes. If you're a creative person I'm sure you can get away designing the arcade of your dreams with the available options. All my arcades ended up looking the same after a while, but I really enjoyed going into the game's Discord or Steam community sections and seeing all the creative builds others have made. I can't really be bothered to whip something up outside a line of token machines, followed up by arcade machines of the same type all lined up next to each other, but don't let me lack of creativity imply that the tools are there if you're able to use them. There's also lots of cheats and intended exploits in the game that let you play how you want. I really can't explain it, but even though I knew that things were broken, I kept coming back to the game. I even found myself going back to the campaign level I was stuck on. I just didn't want to give up on this game no matter what it did to me. There's something endearing to Arcade Tycoon. I can't put my finger on it, but it's there. I almost wish I could've followed this game from those early Kickstarter days to now.... Well, maybe not that far back, but it would've been fun playing this during its original run on Steam.
Now before I move on I have to point out something big. I got this game for review around mid-December with a post date by January 11. That was more than enough time to play the game, experience all its ups and downs, and even write this review. Then, just days before I'm going to publish it, the game got a huge 2.0 update that fixed a lot of my issues with the game (like the non-progression), made it far more stable, and even tweaked the interface and notification system. While I'm not at all a fan of the interface changes (I think things looked far better before), and they removed the Marketing bug that let you run campaigns for no money, it did completely change up the gameplay experience I initially had and described here. I didn't want this review to be dated before it even came out, so I had to rewrite entire sections of it, and leave out many issues I had with it since they weren't even in the game anymore. I still left in the big ones, and the game still does crash from time to time for reasons I can't really figure out, but if I was able to forgive Pokémon Violet for this kind of thing, I guess I can forgive Arcade Tycoon too. Also, this update, and my review for that matter, are still coming out weeks before the game is available to everyone. From what I understand there will be another big update before it launches, so I guess you'll have to watch this review for any updates in the future.
Let's move onto something besides gameplay. What about graphics? Graphics in Arcade Tycoon are an interesting topic as I don't know how I feel about them. Right off the bat I have to say that they're pretty limited. You only have a few customer types, most of your employees look the same, and I don't think the game could ever have enough decoration options for it to feel complete to me. Some of the attractions are pretty unique to each other, but most of them are just simple palate swaps. There's nothing besides colors and labels to tell most of them apart, and things like the VR machines are literally just the same sprite over and over. I also was hoping for something a bit more retro-inspired, but you don't really get that here. The art style feels more cartoon-y then retro video game-y. Now, I don't want to make it seem like the visuals are bad, because they really aren't, they're just not what I was hoping to find in a game called "Arcade Tycoon". With all that said, some rides, food stalls, and decorations are still really cool, and there is a lot of variety here, even if not all of it is original. I guess I shouldn't complain too much about the somewhat weak graphics, as there can sometimes be hundreds of things going off at any one time, and the game really seems to struggle at times. I guess I'm trying to say that the graphics are serviceable for what they are, even if I don't care for them all that much personally. Oh, and not being able to fashion a sign above your arcade? That's just a missed opportunity right there. Music fares far better than graphics in my opinion, and there's quite a few tracks for you to enjoy here. Now none of the songs are true standouts, and there are a few that I think "borrow" from their influences a bit too much, but some of them really grew on me after a while. I'd find myself humming along to them, and even hoped that the next one to play would be one of my favorites. It got to the point that I nearly bought the soundtrack on Steam, as it was on sale along with the game during the holidays. Thankfully I waited on this, because I was eventually gifted the soundtrack when I joined the game's Discord. (I suggest you do this too by the way.) Listening to the music without any of the other arcade insanity going on made me appreciate it all the more. Actually, I think the only real gripe I had with the sound design has to do with everything but the music. I was really let down by how... non-arcade a lot of the sound effects were. Most of the machines barely seemed to make sound at all, and they all had a limited output when they decided bother with sounds in the first place. I guess hearing a cacophony of bangs, booms, and song jingles might be a bit too messy for some, but that's half the fun of the arcade in my opinion. That's one of the big things that's missing here. You can adjust the sound levels in the options, but nothing I did could quite get it to the levels I'm trying to describe. Maybe I'm just over-thinking it, but everything just sounded too chill and cozy for me. Chill and cozy might be a vibe and a trend, but I don't think it necessarily suits the hustle and bustle of an arcade.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to talk about the odd controls in Arcade Tycoon, but there were so many oddities that I just had to cover them. This was a game that was clearly made for the PC, and there are a lot of weird elements that still exist from that iteration in the Switch version. Most boxes have "x"s that are clearly meant to be clicked on, and there are descriptions that the PC version shows when you mouse hover over things that haven't been replaced with any on-screen text. There's also still some stray instructions mentioning "clicking" and the like, but I think those would be too numerous to list here. Maybe these are things that will be fixed in future updates, but I find it really odd how little they changed things for this version. Also, even though most of the controls are explained in the tutorials, and some are simple enough to be intuitive, you'll have to figure out how to do a lot of things on your own. My first arcade had all the machines facing one direction because you're never really told how to properly rotate machines. There are also several sub-menus that you have to press the A button to be able to interact with, even though there is nothing on-screen to tell you this. Even weirder, if you pause the game you'll sometimes be transported to the furthest corners of whatever map you're own. Since these big empty zones have a surprising amount of space, it might take a while for you to figure out where your arcade actually is. Oh, and when that happens the actual controls will often be fighting to take you back to said random corner. This is all stuff you'll get used to, but I just wish things were explained better, or if there was an in-game manual one could refer to. A little really would've gone a long way here.
I want to talk about something that kept popping into my head the entire time I was playing. When people think of Tycoon games they usually go towards bigger releases like RollerCoaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, or Zoo Tycoon. What they often fail to remember is that there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller budget Tycoon games that flooded store shelves. These could still be fun, and some showed far more polish than their price tag deserved, but it never felt right to compare the two different types of Tycoon games to each other. It's obvious which set were the better games, and that usually meant you were paying more for them. Arcade Tycoon is one of the best examples of the latter category, it's a budget game that is definitely punching above its weight. It's not a bad game, far from it, but it will never be able to compete with some of the AAA (relatively speaking at least) examples of the genre. How could it even? This was made by a three-person team, and even though not it's far from perfect, it's clear that a lot of passion went into creating it. When I started researching the game, and looking up its community online, I was surprised to find that there was a lot of hate towards the game. I get that some people might be disappointed in what was eventually delivered from the Kickstarter, but considering how little that Kickstarter actually raised, I can't help but wonder what exactly they were expecting to get. This may be a controversial opinion, but I think games of this type should be judged by their scope compared to their cost. Considering this is far from a full-priced retail release, one shouldn't expect that level of quality here. Underneath all its flaws, there's a really great game here. You just have to be open to actually seeing it first. This is the part of the review where I talk about the longevity of a game and how it stands up in the replayability department. Like most things here though, it's a mixed bag that requires a bit more explanation than I initially thought. It's easy to say that Arcade Tycoon has infinite replayability, because it really does. I played it well over 20 hours during my initial review period, and then tacked on another 5-10 more when I saw that a big update released right before publishing this review. I'd probably have put in even more hours into my first run if I didn't come across the game-breaking bugs I've mentioned already. There's just so much to do here that I simply can't fit it all into this review. You can spend over 25-30 hours just on the main campaign levels, even more if you want to perfect them. And Sandbox Mode? Well, you can just go ham in there. I barely even touched that mode in my initial playthroughs since it was kind of buggy after a certain point, but seeing that it's more stable in this recent 2.0 update, I'm sure I'll be fixing that soon. The best part about all of this though? This game only costs $19.99. You can get it even cheaper on Steam when it goes on sale, but honestly 20 dollars for a game like this? On the Nintendo Switch no less? It feels like a steal, especially if take my earlier advice and approach it as the game it is, not what you'd probably want it to be. I've already put in more than enough hours to justify that cost, and I played most of that in a relatively unstable state. Now I don't want to imply that the price point should've been higher per se, but I've played far worse games that have had far bigger price tags than this. You can easily play this one for entire weekends, and that's just priceless.
I have a lot of mixed feelings when it comes to recommending Arcade Tycoon. First off, I do recommend it, let's get that out of the way. I had a lot of fun with it, and it's perfect for those looking for cool simulation or Tycoon game. There's a reason I kept going back to it in spite of game-breaking bugs and crashes, and quite a few of those (maybe most?) have been fixed now. There's just something there that keeps calling to me, and I'm more than willing to answer. It's really captures that budget Tycoon game feel, jankiness and all. If you can look behind the bugs, and to be fair the developers have indeed fixed many of the ones I experienced during my review period, then pick this one up. I'm sure you'll find something to enjoy. If you require your games to have a high level of polish though, you might want to wait this one out, or even skip it altogether. Or maybe live a little and try it out, I don’t know, I just really like this game. Either way, I have to get back to Tanelorn Tokens. Running an arcade is a full-time job after all! Check Out Arcade Tycoon on The Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-tycoon-switch/ Story: N/A (Though there is progression.) Gameplay: C Graphics: B+ Music/Sound: B Value: B Overall: B- Pros: + Captures the spirit of Tycoon-style games of old. + Lots of options that allow you to create an arcade all your own. + Several campaign levels that almost come together in a sort of Story Mode. + The music and quirky character designs are quite entertaining at times. + Unlocking the next options, or the best attractions, can be very rewarding. + It can be really fun to just see the arcade begin to run itself after a while. +/- The most recent update (still pre-release) changes the game in ways that aren't all positive. Cons: - Just like the budget Tycoon games of old, Arcade Tycoon is full of bugs. - There are many times where you seem to hit a wall in the game where it becomes unplayable, sometimes literally due to game crashes. - While there are a lot of options for your arcade, most feel pretty shallow once you realize they're mainly palate swaps. - Even though many initial problems have been fixed on the Switch before release, there have been several bugs that have persisted since its Early Access days according to several online accounts. A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way. #ArcadeTycoonNintendo
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