Pizza Shop Simulator

My spreadsheet instincts lit up when I first read the pitch for Pizza Shop Simulator: manage dough types, sauce layering, cook times, oven upgrades, customer satisfaction scores, plus a parallel criminal operation running underneath the whole thing. On paper, that is a genuinely interesting dual-economy loop. In practice, right now, the Early Access build earns a Steam score sitting around 16-18% positive from its first wave of reviewers, and that number tells you something important before you spend a single cent. The surface layer is a first-person restaurant management sim. You select ingredients, assemble orders to spec, watch oven timings, and reinvest profits into shop upgrades like better ovens, prep equipment, and interior decor including neon signs, furniture arrangements, and music options. You can also name your own pizzas and design a custom menu, which is a small detail that management-sim fans will appreciate. The menu expands beyond pizza too, with doner kebabs and wraps available to bring in a broader customer pool. On the upgrade side, you can eventually hire cooks and counter staff to offload repetitive tasks while you focus elsewhere. These are solid systemic building blocks, the kind that in a polished state could support 20-30 hours of satisfying incremental play. The darker layer is where the concept gets ambitious. At night the pizzeria doubles as a front for underworld dealings: hidden gambling tables, backroom package exchanges, and rival gang interference that can disrupt daytime operations. Get caught by the cops and you are sent back to a puzzle-based escape sequence before you can resume business. That day-night tension, legal front versus criminal back-end, is a legitimately fresh hook for the cooking-sim genre. The problem is that the current build is not stable enough to let that tension breathe. Community feedback points to stiff controls, rough character models, and crashes that interrupt sessions before the interesting late-game pressure even kicks in. The developers have already acknowledged a full project rebuild, which is not a minor admission for an Early Access title a few weeks old. From a systems perspective, the decision depth simply is not there yet. Tracking customer satisfaction scores and running daily specials are present in the build, but the criminal economy side lacks the interconnected variables that would make the dual-management loop feel like a coherent whole rather than two separate minigames glued together. The tutorial situation is unclear from available coverage, which for a sim that mixes restaurant management with crime mechanics is a genuine concern: new players need onboarding that covers both halves of the loop simultaneously. The developers have stated a full-release target within twelve months, and they are taking community feedback through Discord and the Steam hub, but the rebuild history already shows the roadmap is not firm. If you are a sim enthusiast who likes to back concepts early and watch them develop, the underlying idea here has real merit. The dual-economy structure, menu customization depth, and criminal progression layer are exactly the kind of interconnected systems I want to see in this genre. But with a review score that low and a rebuild already on the record, patience is the correct play. Wishlist it, check back in six months.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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