Single Espresso is a Diner Dash-style game in which you run a coffee shop out of a van, except that the van turns into a concrete building at some point during the campaign. It actually feels most similar to Plate Up! in that you’re making a bunch of multi-step recipes by interacting with different tables in sequence. It also has a roguelite mode like Plate Up! as well, but I wasn’t interested in playing more after the short campaign and can’t say much about it. It looked like largely more of the same.
The campaign, meanwhile, is a series of levels that supposedly take place in various cities in the UK and Ireland but that have basically nothing to do with those places. The closest you get to a real connection is that Welsh Cakes are only sold in the Welsh levels, but otherwise it’s just a sequence of each city introducing more recipes beyond the ones the last city had. None of the recipes really require anything new, though. Each one has steps that either require you to activate a station or activate a station and then wait a few seconds. There’s nothing more involved than that, and the timers you’re waiting for mostly aren’t long enough for it to be worth the effort of trying to make something else at the same time. Customers are incredibly patient and it’s trivial to keep up with orders even if you take every optional group request, so there’s no pressure to multitask either. The only thing that might change this is if you’re going for the secret 4th star on some of the later levels.
I say the later levels specifically because the campaign includes perks that give ridiculous bonuses and matter more than playing well on the early levels. Each one has three levels and they typically give bonuses up to +60% of something or up to +4.5 seconds on the level timer each time you do a certain action. These bonuses are insanely strong to the point that they often just invalidate or totally reverse whatever mechanism they’re interacting with. Customer patience is completely irrelevant at 160% and breakdowns are a good thing when repairing them gives you 4.5 seconds, for example. Even more strangely, you get far too many skill points for how many skills there are. Games normally either give you too few points to unlock everything or just enough to do it at 100% completion, but Single Espresso gives you so many that you can always max skills as soon as they unlock and will have loads of spare points at the end.
Conclusion
This isn’t a bad game, but it also isn’t memorable in any way. Every level is pretty much the same thing and most systems either feel incomplete or actively work against the game’s design. Maybe the roguelite mode fixes some of my problems by limiting what you have access to, but I just couldn’t be bothered to play any more. Still, you could do worse for the price. Give it a look if you like the theme and aren’t expecting much.
Rating: 65%
Time to beat: 2.5 hours for the campaign
Price: $7
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