Flipline Studios has once again decided to port over one of their other games, Papa’s Pizzeria. I am surprised that this wasn’t the first game to be ported over to Steam but better late than never. The game has been updated with new quality-of-life features and the gameplay has been tweaked and updated.
Pros and Cons
Fun casual gameplay to enjoy
Customizable options for your character and restaurant for each holiday
Classic Papa Louie art style
Cons
Some of the minigames are very difficult to complete
Gameplay
You will be serving customers a wide variety of pizzas with different toppings. Luckily for Papa Louie, he made bank by selling only pepperoni pizzas, but since this is the deluxe edition, a few more toppings have been added. The gameplay has been improved, and I loved the quality-of-life features that were added. In the original game, the customers didn’t specify how they liked the toppings on their pizzas, but now it’s much easier.
You can create/customize your character or use one of the game's characters if you want. I should note that you can’t change the appearance of the base character you can play as in the game. You can change what clothing they wear to match the seasons but not their appearance. So, to me, it’s only fitting that my Sona Skyknighter decided to help run this Pizzeria and serve the local customers.
There are two types of customers you will see throughout the game, closers and extreme closers. Closers are the everyday people you will come across in the game, extreme closers are the people you get at the end of the day. I say this because every customer in the game is extremely picky about how their pizza is made. Accidentally put a topping on the wrong side and decided to make it how they wanted it, but the said toppings were on a different side. Well, that customer will deduct that from your overall order score, so that means they want it exactly how they asked it.
Seasons are here again, and you will unlock season-exclusive toppings, have you ever wanted to wonder what Egg Nogg on pizza would taste like for Christmas? No? Well, Santa loves that topping so it’s a thing. You can also get seasonal decorations and clothing with the tips you receive from the customers after serving their pizzas.
There is also a mode where you can make pizzas from this food truck however you like them. You do have to cut them still though or the customer will not be happy with their order, you can cut them how you like, as long as it’s in a set pattern that the game gives you. You are also able to switch between any of the seasonal toppings of your choosing. Serve Valentine’s Day toppings during Halloween if you so wish.
At the end of the day, you can play minigames and if you win the minigame, you can win a random prize. These prizes are seasonal, but they are exclusive to the minigames only and you can’t find them in shops, although get ready to win the same prizes a bunch of times. Although the minigames are where my issues start to lie, some are unfair.
The first minigame I want to talk about is Customer Cravings, this minigame is quite simple, guess the correct order for the customer you serve. There is a slight problem, you see there is a new mechanic that Papa’s Pizzeria introduces. You can sometimes, unlock two customers in one day, the issue is, the game sometimes won’t tell you this and they might not show up. Thus, when it comes to Customer Cravings, it can be a problem when you don’t know anything about said customer's order. Now there is a way to cheat this by just going on the wiki and finding out said order but for those who don't do that like me; it becomes a problem. Unless I happened to server said customer and I just did not remember as they only came once. Other than that, this is the hardest version of Customer Cravings by far.
Strike Out is a minigame where you try and strike out this Baseball batter, the issue here is that the cursor moves too fast. You need to avoid the red line or the batter will hit the ball but since the cursor moves so fast in the later levels, the minigame becomes basically impossible to complete. Papa’s Raceway still suffers from cheating AI and Fashion Flambe is a little underwhelming for me. The only minigames I was able to do anything on, were Mitch’s Mess, Hot Shot, and Freeze-Put, although Freeze-Put can be a bit difficult in the later stages too it’s possible.
Graphics and Performance
The art style for Papa’s Pizzeria is nice, now the original game had this unique art style that isn’t present here so if you liked the original, it’s not going to be here. I tested the game on an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, and 16 GB of RAM, the game should be able to be run on any computer with no issues.
Final Verdict
Papa’s Pizzeria is a nice throwback to the original game with some nice changes and quality-of-life improvements from the original. Fans of the original game should be able to enjoy this game with no issues whatsoever, well. There are some things that fans of the original may like that have been taken away from this game but overall, I enjoyed it and it’s a fun casual game to play when you are looking to chill.
My Original Review
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