Brew Town review
:: FUN BUT SIMPLEPrice: F2P
Version: 1.1
App Reviewed on: iPad Pro
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If you've ever wanted to brew your own beers and manage a hoppy empire, Brew Town is definitely the game for you. Hell, even if you've never wanted to do that, it's worth having a go at it.
It may not be a particularly deep experience and feels a little overkill with its adverts, it's not a bad game once you get past all of the free to play stuff.
Fizzy whizzy
Brew Town is a beer-making tycoon where you make your own beers, experiment with flavours, design your own labels, bottle it by tapping, and make sure you've got enough to fill orders and make money.
Ultimately, you want to keep unlocking different types of beers, improving your formulas, and keep building the profit value of each one to get all of that sweet, sweet cash.
Bottle caps, hops, and cash are the three key factors of the game. You need to harvest hops to brew the beer, money to buy upgrades for your Brewhouse, HQ, warehouses, etc., and bottle caps for speed up processes super sharpish.
Visually, it's simple but attractive in its design. Because there's quite a lot on screen to manage and multiple places to flick between, its basic 3D art style works well to keep things from feeling clustered.
The actual process of building up your beer is mildly amusing, however the most fun I had was designing the label. Sure, you've got pre-set designs and other stamps to unlock, but the freebie stencil choice is pretty substantial.
Whether it's a bottle or a can, you alter the lid colour, the body colour, and then get to work messing about on the label. Each stamp lets you choose where to put it, what colour it should be, how big or small it should be, and more.
Let's get busy
Once the first hour goes by and the amusement starts to wear off, you start experiencing the more typical side of free to play games in general. There's a lot of fun to be had without spending a penny, but you'll be substituting a bunch of your time instead.
Brewing up your set of 100 or so beers takes a certain amount of time to do. What starts off as just a minute gradually increases alongside your profit value, as does attempting to increase your beer's profit itself.
Improving your beer can take over 40 minutes real-time, though you can cut that down by watching adverts or by using bottle caps. Unless you buy a big bunch of bottle caps from the get go, you probably won't have many to chuck about, so watching an advert decreases the time by 10 minutes per watch.
It's about 30 seconds per advert, even with the 'preferred partners'-themed upgrades, so it's not too bad. The kicker is when you're brewing up and improving a bunch of beers to tackle your daily achievements. Eventually the frequency of watching adverts becomes harder to ignore.
That being said, you can just play while watching a TV show in real life and wait each advert out.
Its other dilemma is that it's a rather shallow experience. Occasionally you may leave customers waiting because beer needs to be restocked, but that doesn't come back to haunt you. Choosing your beer's flavour combination also doesn't seem to matter so long as you're successful in the little mini-game.
I mean, I'm not judging, but lemongrass and bacon beer isn't what I'd be going for if there's a choice. Customers didn't seem to mind, though.
Or just tipsy
I feel like you have to sink more than just a few hours into the game to really discover whether you can get by on its free to play elements or whether you'd have to start investing money into it.
It's not a great game, but that doesn't mean it's a bad one either. Brew Town is weirdly addictive and amusing, and if you're a fan of tycoon games or clickers, you'll definitely enjoy it.