Graphically speaking this game is outdated by a few years. Judging by what I have seen on the internet the graphics are improved since the original was released. The customers in the restaurant have different clothes and hair styles but as your restaurants get packed, you\'ll start to see people looking alike. The pictures of the prepared meals look yummy at times but then there are some gross looking recipes. For example the picture for lavender tea shows a cup of fluorescent purple tea...I wouldn\'t drink that.

When it comes to the audio, the story sequences are all text conversations. Voice acting would have added so much more to the already well developed characters. The original scenarios have Armand talking in the beginning and it was weird after playing through and beating the game in silence to hear him talking at the end; it was like "Whoah! he talked!". The sound effects are good, with the restaurant noises of dishes being picked up and background (jibberish) conversations. An occasional ambient audio track is played adding a nice touch.

I\'ve already touched on the appropriateness issue of Armand having the option of cheating on his wife. It was nice to see their marriage restored and his wife forgives him either way. Other than that complaint, there are some female statues that can use a little more clothes on them. The original scenarios has some mafia financial assistance which doesn\'t promote good values.

Overall this game is quite a value since it combines both games. They are fairly similar, though one cool addition to the sequel is the option to have live entertainment in your restaurants. Hopefully you won\'t experience slowness on the TV show puzzles as they make the game unplayable. There is some replay value in sandbox (free play) mode but I find the goal oriented scenarios much more fun. Although this is a fun game I have trouble recommending it because of the immoral content. The original game I highly recommend as long as you don\'t mind even more outdated graphics.

A can't miss for under $20. Very similar to the first version. Some of the cutscenes become redundant in an almost rinse, wash and repeat fashion such as buying new ingrediants and how to spice up your recipes for a price. Overall, a good evening or two of fun then put it on the shelf for a while and come back to it later.

To be honest, I got rather bored with this game after a while, but if these types of games are your cup of tea - especially if you like the idea of running a restaurant - then you should enjoy this game.

I'm a fan of these types of games, I used to play Diner Dash and Burger Island at yahoo games, then facebook came, I played Restaurant City and Cafe World. So when I received an email and found this on the list, just the word 'Restaurant' on the title made me buy it immediately. My impulse buying didn't backfire on my though, I'm currently enjoying the game. It just a few hours since I started playing it and I'm already enjoying it. I just have one problem with it, that is, the lack of some sort of newbie guide to the game play. I guess they compensated it with the manual, but to be realistic, nobody really RTFM hehehe. So an in-game guide is really better. Albeit that, everything is great!

A very nice game where you run your own restaurant or chain of restaurants. Its really great and you can decide whats on the menu, the prices, discounts and who to hire. You can deside if you want to give a customer his favorite dish even if its not available on the restaurant meny. Another cool feature is you furnish your restaurant, kitchen and toilete on your own taste.

This game is a combination platter of the original Restaurant Empire and the sequel Restaurant Empire 2. Each game starts you off slowly, and adds in extra things to make the game more complex with each new scenario.

You can construct on both floors of a two floor restaurant without any real problem; all you need to do is make sure you assign your servers to stay on a particular floor. Put a dumbwaiter in the kitchen to automatically move the food from the kitchen on the first floor to the servers on the second floor.

You will get lots and lots of complaints about your staff early in the game no matter what you do. They will get better as the game progresses, as will your chefs. You can hire new staff members, but chefs only come around as a special event. Hiring new chefs is always a good idea, so you can fully staff any new restaurants that you may build.

There's not a lot of replayability in the scenarios, but the game will take you quite a while to play all the way through. There's also a sandbox mode where you can start with a certain amount of money and build your own custom restaurants. This mode has much more free-form playing, and you can try all sorts of different strategies in this mode. Overall, it's an enjoyable game.

Restaurant Empire II adds some new FLAVOR to the game, but, not that much more from the previous orgional game except for the missions of course are a bit different since you are more or less running a coffee shop/pit grill vs a real restaurant although there is one of those included.

Same ole customer interactions for new ingredients and them telling you how the best way to prepare a recipe is included. Same ole towns scenes. Omni is still around but not as powerful as the first time around

You do get the origional game included with the new one so for those that have never played RE then this is a pretty good bargain for you.

Elements of training your employees, hiring and firing them are included. Buying advertisement and upgrading your front of your restaurants is there. For the most part money isn't an issue so it's rather silly to use low comfort low eye candy tables, chairs etc when you start out. The higher the comfort and eye candy the more restaurant stars you will get so you can upgrade the front to draw in more customers.

You rarely if ever need to construct upstairs and at any rate this just slows down delivery times and makes your customer complaints go up thus your star ratings go down. What I use the upstairs for is rest rooms and training room. I put new low pay low rank employees upstairs and let them train until they get full or near full bars then bring them downstairs or to other restaurants I've started. Works great that way as customers don't complain about having to go upstairs to use the restroooms.

Overall for a newcomer it's worth the $19.95 price tag. I spent many hours playing the origional game until it finally became boring and redundant. Would have been nice if it had more missions and they were harder than the ones in the game as most are pretty easy to fulfill in the alotted times.

You might want to wait for another $4.99 special onsale price as that is what I paid for it a few weeks ago. I'd give it a 7.9 overall and replayability score.