TapBlaze’s Good Coffee, Great Coffee allows cozy gamers to live out their café-owning dreams. It was released for Android and iOS users on Feb. 27.
The game expands TapBlaze’s world of relaxing cooking games, mimicking the play style of their popular Good Pizza, Great Pizza game, which allows players to start their very own pizzeria.
These cooking games are not the first of their kind. Many gamers today may remember the popular Flipline Studios and their Papa’s Pizzeria games, with one of the most recent ones being Papa’s Mocharia released in March 2021. These games utilized the same restaurant settings as Good Coffee, Great Coffee and Good Pizza, Great Pizza, allowing players to act as cashier, cook and server. TapBlaze’s two games differ in that they also follow storylines outside of the usual restaurant management gameplay where they befriend customers, meet critics and compete with restaurant rivals.
Good Pizza, Great Pizza met great popularity on TikTok, where players posted gameplay, tips and even ASMR videos of them playing. The game is played in chapters, allowing players to adore characters such as Buddy — a once-homeless customer-turned-circus-bear-trainer who helps you throughout the game — and begrudgingly learn to love competitors like Allesandro Alicante, owner of Alicante’s Pizzeria.
“The best game I’ve ever played; it’s so relaxing and comfortable when [you’re] on the road, or at home. You can customize your restaurant and make it just how you want!” one Google Play reviewer wrote of the game.
While Good Pizza, Great Pizza currently has a rating of 4.7 stars on Google Play and in the Apple Store and a 4.5-star rating on Steam, Good Coffee, Great Coffee has not been met with the same success.
Good Coffee, Great Coffee currently sports a rating of 3.0 stars on Google Play and 4.0 stars on the Apple Store. Many users complain that their games crash, making Good Coffee, Great Coffee unplayable, while others mention that they’ve been met with black screens and frozen frames. Players who were able to play without any technical issues struggled with many of the game mechanics or didn’t like the game’s “energy” point system, which allows you to make only a certain number of coffees a day, a feature that wasn’t in Good Pizza, Great Pizza.
“Milk frothing is hard because you have to hold perfectly still to get it at the right angle, and somehow I can’t do that,” one player wrote on Google Play. “But even more frustrating is the latte art, which takes a lot of time and requires a fingertip as small as a pencil point to be able to actually make it look right. I am constantly failing orders because of the art.”
But what the game lacks in playability, it makes up for in its plot. Like in Good Pizza, Great Pizza, the coffee game follows even more eclectic characters through multiple in-depth storylines filled with coffee puns, creating a reprieve from the monotonous mundanity of coffee brewing. The game has the same wryly humorous chapters and takes many influences from Good Pizza, Great Pizza.
One of these influences is Teddy, a clearly Buddy-inspired customer of the Good Coffee, Great Coffee café who works as a train conductor at the now-abandoned train station. Players are met with yet another absurd TapBlaze storyline as they observe Teddy attempt to restore the train station with the help of some coffee-bean-eating monkeys he found hiding among the tracks.
Another fan-favorite character is Max, a grumbling World Coffee Association judge who gives the player tips and tricks for running their café. A latte art professional and master brewer, Max judges players in the Coffee Brew-Off competition. He reluctantly enjoys the coffee and secretly comes back for more under the guise of further adjudication.
While Good Coffee, Great Coffee may not quite meet the success of Good Pizza, Great Pizza just yet, game developers have proactively come out with updates, working to create a better game experience in the future.
Corinna Chin is an Arts & Entertainment Staff Writer. She can be reached at corinnac@uci.edu.
Edited by Lillian Dunn.