Back Alley Inn Reviews

Would definately call this a game with a lot of fun ideas mixed into it. The tutorial is both relaxed and not information overload, and even if you accidentally skip a tutorial, you can probably work out whats going on (hint: dont skip the adventure one like I accidentally did!). Developer is currently responsive and it seems will be making changes so even though the game is pretty solid, with a few small non-gameplay breaking quirks, I anticipate very good things for this game soon.

This is definitely NOT the best game or best example of this idea because it has and can have a lot more work done to it but I find this pretty fun to pass the time and the beginning is a *little* hard but after the beginning, it is pretty much a easy run if you don't you know don't act stupid. Would I recommend this for other people? Depends, if its more than a dollar cuz I don't remember how much I got this, I wouldn't price this game over $2.59 . It get repetitive and they should/should've added more events like a rush bus or a dungeon break to make it more risky but at it is right now I wouldn't play this more than a day or two. If you want any tips starting off, forget the tutorial. It is basically useless, spend a couple new games on how to star off, getting the right combo on adventurers and it is just a grind getting new recipes. Then get training rooms for adventures, it makes them super OP but it also makes the enemies stronger so you can have one strong adventurer and 3 or less weak adventurers to make the dungeon even but you have to rely on only the strong adventurer. I can give out more tips but I don't think they are needed, the games too easy but I like the idea, if anyone can recommend another same idea but more difficult and realistic thank you! :D

glitch pushes my camera up and to the left no matter what I do its is always moving the camera. I have removed my mouse and keyboard completely and still it slowly zooms in up and to the left.

First off, the staff available to hire is randomized, so either you have to 1) hope you get lucky and the three you need for the initial required rooms (two workers and a chef) are available, 2) keep restarting until you do get the three you need, or 3) let the game run on fast forward, skipping days until you can hire those three beginning people, which means losing money until you can open. The 'adventures' you can send on are basically a version of games like Best Fiends, but the game does nothing to explain how it works, so it's entirely possible to end up with a group that will get stuck in a battle of attrition, where you can't do enough damage to get past the heals the enemy does. Combine that with the available adventurers also being randomized, you might not even be able to HIRE enough of a variation to make a decent group. There are no tooltips for things that matter. You don't get any info on whether customer interactions are good or bad, or explanations on why they are either one. Is my chef actually working? Who knows! Why is that customer so angry? Your guess is as good as mine! I got it on sale for $1.19 USD, and even with that, it's not worth it. Considering there's been no contact, no news, no update, no nothing for two years, don't count on this improving.

The game is buggy and missing tooltips. The gameplay is extremely RNG heavy and unbalanced making the game unplayable without giving you a clue what you might be doing wrong or how to fix it. The game appears to give you a massive amount of space to build in but the vast majority of that space actually can't be built on. 1) First of all, the energy system is very annoying. You have to wait for energy for everything and the fast forward doesn't work. This makes trying to figure out the extremely poorly documented features an exercise in frustration because the buildings aren't expensive but require energy which discourages exploration. 2) If you try to fast forward the game will randomly pause instead. Fast forward is extremally buggy and will randomly change speeds from no fast forward, to a bit faster, to extremely fast if you're lucky (except if you're on an adventure at which point it makes the adventure unplayable). 3) There are very few tool tips. The customers show an icon showing what you need to stock but there are multiple items with the same icon so it's of limited help. The stats don't give you a clue what they're supposed to do. 4) Everything is super RNG. Want to get your party going? Better hope that you can get more then two elements used. Want to cook food for your guests? Better hope that the ingredients show up. Want to sell food to your guests? Better hope that you can hire workers. 5) Building explanations are non existent. Why would I want a Shared Room or Private Room (or any room for that matter)? Why would I want a hall, seated hall, or large hall? Do any of these rooms improve energy regen? Give more gold? This wouldn't be nearly as bad if the buildings only took gold so I could try building them and scrapping them if I don't like them but they require energy which appears to only regen in real time and the fast forward doesn't work correctly. 6) Adventures are forced to end prematurely wasting all the energy and gold spent to go on them because there are no matches on the board. There is no auto reset of the board or warning that you're out of matches and you're out of luck. You have to manually check every possible option before abandoning the adventure and wasting the energy which is real time. 7) Fast forward does impact the Adventures as it vastly speeds up the opponent's action bar and there's not way to turn it off while on the adventure so more wasted Energy and gold. You can see the animations go super fast. I don't think it's consistent but I only ever had the energy to do a few adventures so I don't know for sure. 8) What do stats do? Body seems to increase HP but what about Soul and Mind? Once again missing hover text and explanations. 9) Stat training is a very stupid thing to do. You end up facing mobs with more HP then you have and attacks that do 22 damage vs your 1 or 2 damage. This is the point that I quit playing. I increased body, mind, and soul and nothing increased my damage. This could be a bug in the hover text but I didn't stick around to check. 10) The shopping interface is awful. The ingredients are random but they don't show you how many you have or how many you need for current orders. Instead of having a nice clean interface with how many you have, how many you need for the queued jobs, and what you can buy they have a multi tab inventory with what you have in stock and the jobs on a separate screen. In order to see what you have in stock and what you can purchase you have to scroll through both long lists and make sure you check the correct tabs for your inventory. The inventory is in alphabetical order while the list of items you can buy are not which adds to the frustration every time you go to stock your inn. 11) The game doesn't give you a clue how much you need for wages and doesn't allow you to reserve gold. This leads to situations were you miss calculated how much you needed and were short so the game randomly fires people and doesn't tell you. You then need to figure out who was fired and how to recover. If all your workers were fired and the RNG doesn't give you the option to hire more workers this round you need to fire everyone and wait for the buggy fast forward to move you to a new day where hopefully the RNG will start to let you rebuild from the accident. This is not a fun mechanic. This is a game that's easy to get a lot of hours on because you need to leave it running in the background to get anywhere due to the broken fast forward, energy system, and RNG. I tried to give it a fair chance and I regret purchasing it as the game quickly gets to be unplayable if you experiment and the energy system is horrible. I wish I had refunded it at two hours instead of hoping it would get better as it only gets worse the longer you play.

Looks like a halfway done mobile game. Too much of a hassle for a game designed to pass the time. Also weird graphical glitches and bugs that can be found in the first 15 minutes does not help. Pretty cheap but still refunded the product because I would probably never touch it again.