Reporting on the games I've played
Note: As of January 31, 2012, Baking Life has gone off-line and is no longer in development.
Casual social gaming has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past few years, especially with the rise of social networks like Facebook and the development of "new" mobile phones in the era of iOS and Android. One of the most popular forms of social gaming is the simulation game, like FarmVille, which is extremely popular on Facebook and I've had many friends try to coax me into playing. However, I've been pretty wary of the time commitments involved in playing these games, no matter how simple they seem, so I avoided them for a while.
Then PopCap Games, the maker of several puzzle and strategy games I enjoy (Plants Vs. Zombies, Zuma, Bejeweled, Peggle) purchased the company that made the simulation game, Baking Life. With PopCap pushing this game, I decided to see what drove so many friends to play these games and give Baking Life a shot. For the most part, after achieving a very high level, I wasn't particularly impressed, but I can definitely see the appeal.
The conceit of the game is that you own a little bakery and you need to bake stuff to sell to customers to make money to improve your bakery to bake more stuff to sell to more customers at greater cost so you can... you get the idea. There's not too much more to the game than there as there is really no end to the game. As you bake you will gain experience to gain levels which will let you bake a larger variety of baked goods which vary in selling price, cooking time and amount of servings. With the money you earn, you can buy different items to improve the variety of goods you can sell at once, sell coffee, and handle more guests.
The social aspect comes in that you can invite your friends to work for you for free (as your store grows you will need to hire more employees who take a cut of your profits) and friends can send you gifts from free servings of food to decorations for your store to components that you need to build or upgrade some of the equipment in your store. The more friends you have playing the more free stuff you can get. All that stuff and money comes in handy because the nicer looking your store, the more money you can earn per sale.
The gameplay is pretty dry and mechanical otherwise. You can be kept on your toes because you have to take your products out of ovens before they burn and the quicker baking recipes, but it's generally the compulsion to buy newer and fancier stuff for your store that's going to drive you and the game resembles Animal Crossing as a result. Oh, it's also a freemium game, and so you can actually spend real money in the game (well, Facebook credits) to buy premium items or upgrade your store without needing a certain number of friends to join. There is a method of getting the "Zip cash" used to buy premium items for free, but you don't get much and it takes a long time, so the game puts the pressure on you to pay up if you want a really nice store.
Presentation wise, the game has bright, bold and colorful flash graphics with a lot of variety when it comes to how you can dress up your store and different seasonal and holiday items available at appropriate times of year. While the game can chug a little on slower machines, overall, it's still not a hugely taxing game. The game has music, but after listening to it for a good long while, I got tired of it and turned it off. I also wanted to turn off the sound effects too, as they are kind of loud and without internal controls to adjust volume, but I sometimes needed the heads up when a baked good was done, so I usually kept it on, to some amount of frustration.
Overall, after the initial expansion and spiffing up my store, the lack of any real development in the game left me quite tired of the game, although I did keep playing to reach the self-driven goal of baking every recipe in the game once. I also didn't appreciate how earnest the game was about trying to get you to spam your friends into playing it and spam your Facebook wall with posts about it. So, while the game might have been a little interesting at first, it's very limited in dimension and hardly interactive in a meaningful way. However, the game's colorful graphics and ability to build your store as you see fit would probably be a draw for more expressive players who love to customize things and don't mind dry repetitive tasks to do so. But that's certainly not going to be enough to impress me and the frustrating social and freemium aspects of the game took a lot away from its limited enjoyment.
This might mean I'm simply the wrong type of gamer for these social simulation games and my problem isn't with Baking Life in particular, but the entire model of business. So, PopCap Games or no, I can't endorse Baking Life (or any of its similarly oriented social simulation competitors, especially those that encourage spamming). There is a segment of the population that will enjoy this, but I'm not it. 4/10.
Links:
- Game Facebook