Lakeside Bar is a game where you run a bar starting from humble beginnings with no staff or decor and a limited menu to a booming business with plenty of employees, a full food and drink menu, and an upgraded space.
The game lets you be as involved as you want to be, but your bar can eventually be run idly and entirely by itself once you hire certain staff members. If you prefer playing actively, you can do everything a server can do like clean tables and take and serve orders, but there are also various mini games and other mechanics too.
Fishing is one of the mini games, and I thought it was a nice addition, you can sell your fish in order to buy decorations that provide bonuses. If you catch all the fish or manage a certain score in some of the mini games, you might even unlock secret staff members. There is also a capsule machine where you can roll for certain in-game benefits like keeping the bar cleaner for longer.
I loved the variety of the food and drinks available as they are real cocktails with alcohol percentages you have to balance with a customer’s preferences and alcohol tolerances if you want to earn their favor and avoid them getting sick.
I do think decorations are a bit too expensive, especially in the beginning of the game, and I’d rather use money on upgrades or buy tables to seat more people, but once you have a lot of income there are quite a few options to pick from.
Progression is fairly easy if you let the game idle a lot, but gameplay time will depend on if you are wanting to unlock all in-game achievements or if you simply play to decorate and have the best min-maxed bar you could possibly have.
Overall, I would recommend this for idle game fans or fans of management games and think it’s well worth its $5.99 price tag on Steam.
*Game key was provided in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
