Launched by Team Tapas, a Korean indie game producer, Bistro Heroes offers an idle game that blends story, game mechanics, and aesthetics to a higher bar. This game made the idle game genre explore alternative ways to be entertained while the energy bar fills up. And it doesn't scream a lot of microtransactions you have to make to get the most out of your play time. You can download this game from Google Playstore.
All images used on this post are my screenshots while playing the game.
The game’s story starts with your party on an exploration mission to find out about the recent earthquakes and monster activity throughout the kingdom. Along the journey the knights find themselves exhausted and starved from the travel until they met the Chef that runs a small kiosk. Chef decides to help them out only if they collect some ingredients to cook with.
The knights obliged and upon fulfilling the quest, they are rewarded with a meal that made them say “yeah we on a mission but this food tastes good, wanna start a camp here for a while to make it convenient for us to scout the area?” then it just later develops into a Bistro business while fulfilling their obligation as knights during ingredient hunting. You hunt for ingredients, meet new characters, have a slice of life scene, and then find out more about what you were sent out to investigate.
It’s not a complicated plot to follow and I just end up skipping most of the dialogues while playing. The thing that really got me hooked was the art style used in the game especially when it comes to showcasing the dishes served. These are the parts of the core content of the game.
I find the battle system intuitive to work with. You’ll get the hang of it if you played a lot of idle type of games and mobile games requiring few user inputs once the battle starts. I didn’t expect the battle system can be challenging at time. Despite how simple swiping and tap the whole battle sequence is done, this game puts a lot of emphasis on premediation, timing, and positioning. The tanks at the front and damage per second or supports at the back formation also works in this game.
Some characters are best to use during dungeon runs involving mobs for their area of effect skills while others are best for the boss runs. This is basic knowledge, I know but the game consistently delivers more challenge with progression and you need to adjust what already works with some minor changes to how even a new minion can change your pacing during combat. I had to do trial and error on some bosses when a new minion uses a new gimmick to screw the party. Brute strength works most of the time until you find yourself hitting a wall where you have to be more precise with your timing to proceed rather than leave the characters autobattle it out.
The success of an instance run will also depend heavily on your roster. Each character brings in some form of crowd control and support. You generally go in blind and just experiment which member works best for a particular instance run. For an idle game, it does offer decent challenges as you progress but not as steep that you have to spend hours.
It also has one feature which I dislike about mobile games nowadays. It’s that limited energy that takes minutes to recharge for you to do some other stuff in the game. But this game offers mini games to help you pass the time and even reward you energy to continue doing those instance runs. This is actually good game design to keep players from being bored with the main game routine and divert their attention to small mini games to pass the time and still be rewarded. It didn’t feel like I was waiting a lot when I was just doing the fishing game.
There are no annoying ads to ruin your gaming experience in this game. Ads do exist but you can find them on reasonable sections instead of randomly popping up on your screen as a prerequisite to a next sequence.
Is this a pay to win game? No, it’s just a single player casual gaming experience where you only compete with yourself. You can access the premium content by just grinding daily or saving up the daily log in rewards. While premium content gives minor stat boosts, you’re not missing out on the from free content the game already gives. In fact, you’re most likely just paying for aesthetics to support the devs rather than paying to win. All decorations and costumes give stat boosts to your heroes so there’s practical use to actually decorate your Bistro.
The rare materials on the game are wood and clothes given as quest rewards. These are the resources necessary to create those decorations and costumes. One just needs enough patience to grind for these materials to make their Bistro and heroines look pretty.
I think I’m already around 1.5/10 of the content done and have reached a plateau where the routine becomes repetitive. I still haven’t unlocked a lot of content but I’m foreseeing myself taking a break or deleting the game entirely. Not that I think it’s a bad game, it’s great, just not enough to get my attention span hooked once I have know the gist of the game as I keep on progressing. My curiosity has been satisfied. It has it’s appeal and I would still recommend it to people that enjoy a mix of fantasy RPG, casual non-competitive, build and design idle game for those that love to find ways to kill time with their phones.
Overall, the game has all the check marks I would love to find on any casual mobile game. You don’t need to put in a lot of time to grind and there’s no consequence if you just feel like you don’t want to play and miss out on seasonal events/limited edition promos to be competitive.
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