Blood Bar Tycoon Review — I Never Drink… Wine.

Blood Bar Tycoon is a bar management game with a neat vampire twist.
Blood Bar Tycoon Featured

Blood Bar Tycoon is a game all about running a high-class vampire bar in the seedier parts of town. Boasting unique characters and some clever takes on tycoon game mechanics, Blood Bar Tycoon is sure to be an exciting title for fans of both vampire lore and business sims. However, despite the game’s interesting mechanics, some areas could use improvements, preventing it from reaching its full potential.

Blood Bar Tycoon offers a pretty straightforward, yet incredibly interesting concept for a tycoon sim game. As a vampire in Crimson City, you take a run-down little dive and face the arduous task of creating premier blood bars and blood factories for the vampire population. Along the way, you will make allies and business partners with some of the prominent members of the vampire community, all while avoiding detection from the vampire hunters.

Blood Bar Tycoon Yumeko
Screenshot: Try Hard Guides

Running a bar in Blood Bar Tycoon is a fairly interesting two-step process. To begin with, your bar attracts two kinds of customers: humans and vampires. While you can certainly make a profit off the human clientele, your real money comes from the vampire customers, who never drink… wine.

Essentially, you build a bar catering to humans, with enough prestige and amenities to bring in a consistent clientele. Then, you periodically abduct these humans and siphon their blood to process into special drinks or serve straight to your vampire clients. Of course, said vampire clients also need a fancy place to drink and have needs for you to meet.

Blood Bar Tycoon Bar
Screenshot: Try Hard Guides

While you will build a two-fold business for your mixed clientele, the vast majority of production goes into the blood side of things. There are numerous ways to trap and process humans into gourmet options for your vampire customers, which you can serve to them directly or sell to the market. The trick of the game comes in managing your minions in such a way as to efficiently serve your customers while also capturing humans and operating machinery.

Your minions (or employees) in Blood Bar Tycoon are vampires themselves, courtesy of the Vamp-‘Hire hiring agency. Choosing which minions (or… employees) to hire is more than just an aesthetic choice, even if that was often my first decision in picking which vampire to vamp-hire. Your potential minions have different stats in speed, which determines their serviceability; intelligence, which influences research points; and charisma, which affects customer satisfaction. Each one also has a skill that can be used in order to protect the secret status of your vampire bar, such as turning invisible or wiping the minds of humans.

As all of this production is going on, you must also protect the secrecy of your operation. Customers cannot be allowed to watch a vampire feed (a need of your employees), find dead bodies, or discover imprisoned humans or stored corpses. Inspectors will occasionally come to make sure your business is on the up and up, and they must be discreetly murdered to avoid detection. Once detected, your business will be attacked by vampire hunters, who will gruesomely dispatch your undead patrons.

Blood Bar Tycoon Minions
Screenshot: Try Hard Guides

Despite how cool this secrecy management system sounds, it seems a little underutilized, with crimes being far too easy to commit blatantly in front of your customers. The first time my employee was caught feeding, she was able to pull it off in front of a full room of humans. Only when the corpse was left on the ground did someone react, and that someone was a single passerby who began to panic, only to be easily brainwashed and turned into a blood slushie.

Another aspect of the game’s management I didn’t really enjoy was how Blood Bar Tycoon implements the production of drinks. While all of the blood drinks can be created, it would seem to me that there is no way to produce human drinks (aka alcohol) on your own, unless there was something in the tech tree I glossed over. It felt strange to me that while running a bar, I couldn’t brew my own beer, but I could manufacture advanced blood drinks easily.

The building in the game is also something that isn’t handled incredibly well. When expanding a room, should you want to build a wall, you have to drag a new room beginning from outside of the already built structure. There didn’t appear to be a way to add walls to a room that was already built, and the grid for the building was a little bit off or weird with its snapping, so I often ended up with asymmetrical walls that bothered the hell out of me. I also found that the restrictions for building on the grid were a little annoying, often leading to tables that didn’t have full chairs or doors I couldn’t place because an immovable object (at least during the campaign) was placed in such a way that it took up too much usable space.

Blood Bar Tycoon Hunt
Screenshot: Try Hard Guides

To end this review on a positive note, I did really enjoy the way the game handled style and building your bar.

Not only does Blood Bar Tycoon feature multiple different styles to unlock, each with its own range of furniture and decorations, but choosing to build a lot in one style not only attracted different types of clientele but also changed the game’s music to match the theming of your bar. This is a clever little way to make each bar unique and give players a way to personalize their bars and opt into some replayability. Often, I found myself making a basic, dirty bar for humans, and giving my vampires a better place to dine.

Overall, Blood Bar Tycoon is a pretty neat tycoon game with some clever mechanics and a cool vampire theme. However, the implementation of some features could have used a little more work, but that shouldn’t stop players from enjoying this neat game and all of the cool vampire characters within.

The Final Word

Though some features feel a bit buffy or underdeveloped, Blood Bar Tycoon remains an interesting tycoon that should appeal to Vampire and restaurant sim fans alike.

8

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Blood Bar Tycoon is available on Steam.

Erik Hodges

Erik Hodges

Erik Hodges is a hobby writer and a professional gamer, at least if you asked him. He has been writing fiction for over 12 years and gaming practically since birth, so he knows exactly what to nitpick when dissecting a game's story. When he isn't reviewing games, he's probably playing them.

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