Blood Bar Tycoon is a simple and silly bar management sim in which you run bars that cater to both humans and vampires. Build, decorate, order supplies, capture humans, kill investigators—you know, the usual bar management stuff.

Official Description:

Blood Bar Tycoon is a vampire bar management game. Build bars and blood factories, lure humans to harvest their blood, process it, and serve your customers: other vampires. Research quirky machines and deal with hunters! Expand through Crimson City to become a mighty Elder!

Long Review:

It’s a silly management sim, but this time with vampires! That’s really the gist of it.

I don’t play a lot of management sims anymore, but I did as a kid. Including Theme Hospital, which I feel like is the grandfather of all the modern silly ones. And the vampire twist to this one sucked me in (pun intended).

It is a very dark sort of silly, capturing humans and putting them in cells and weird machines to extract their blood and all, but that’s part of the fun. The blood machines have funny descriptions. The minions (vampire employees) and the patrons have funny little quips and dialogues above their heads while walking around. There are different types of humans and vampires, which are fun to discover. There are over-the-top vampire characters who guide you and give you missions, and they’re fun too.

There are two difficulties, one more chill, one more challenging. I chose the easier one. You can also unlock sandbox mode after playing a bit, though when I tried it, money was still limited.

It’s pretty standard management stuff. Unless it’s different in the harder mode, it’s not overly complicated or realistic. You build rooms, you place items, you hire workers, you give them job priorities, you buy from or sell to the supplier, you choose what to do with research points you earn, and the rest sort of handles itself. Every so often you get new missions and goals to achieve, or special timed missions. The better you manage and decorate and complete missions, the more money and prestige you get.

Occasionally investigators or hunters show up, so you need to keep an eye out to eliminate them. And if you don’t serve vampires fast enough, they’ll start snacking on the human clients, and then it’s chaos. So I found that a hands-on approach worked best in those situations.

It got repetitive and grindy fairly quickly for me, but almost all these types of games get that way eventually. I feel like the problem with this one is that nothing really new is introduced after the second location or so (I stopped at the fifth, I believe). You can unlock more machines, but they don’t change the gameplay at all. It’s just another machine for the machine room, or another trap you can put in the bar.

Decorating is fun but somewhat limited. There are different decor styles you can unlock as you go, ranging from cyberpunk to country to goth and more, that attract different clientele. They’re cute. You can stick to one theme per room or mix and match.

The graphics overall are cute too. The game feels nicely polished in terms of graphics, UI, theme, etc.

Minion management could be a little better. You can’t do much from the screen that shows you the list of them all, you have to click over to each one individually to see their priority lists and special skills. It’s just a bit of a pain. And sometimes they don’t seem to do what they’re supposed to. Slightly frustrating, but not a huge deal.

I didn’t notice any bugs, unless the minions occasionally seeming to not do their job was a bug, but that might just be how the game works.

I played for 13 hours. I got to the fifth location, I think. There were two more locked locations on the map still.

I bought this on Steam on sale for $15.99.

Overall, I got tired of the repetition before I finished the game, but I still enjoyed the time I did spend playing it! If you like humorous management sims and vampires, it’s a fun way to spend some time.

Short Review:

– Silly management sim with vampires
– Dark humor
– Two difficulty options, plus semi-sandbox
– Fairly simple with moments of chaos
– Decorating is cute but limited
– Got repetitive quickly
– Overall fun if you like this kind of game!

Accessibility:

(May not include everything)
– Can change key bindings (you have to scroll down, I didn’t realize at first).
– Can reverse mouse buttons.
– Can choose easier or harder difficulty.
– Autosave and manual save options.
– I think it could be played with just a mouse, no keyboard, but I’m not certain.
– No blind or screen reader accessibility options.
– Separate volume options, and does not require sound to play.

More Info:

Steam