Bakery Simulator Review

Working in a bakery consumed 12 years of my working life believe it or not. Waking up in the middle of the night just to ensure that there was bread and other baked goods on the shelf when the sun rises was my profession till the end of 2014. Unfortunately unless you own your own gaff then under someone else’s commands you’ll never reap the rewards. It is a role though that requires skill, knowledge, patience and some understanding of science. 

Bakery Simulator captured my interest immediately to see if the accuracy of running your own baked goods business was present here. Here you’ll be starting your baking enterprise from scratch and not only crafting goods from start to finish, but delivering them too. Along the progression path to success you’ll be able to upgrade your equipment to speed up your processes and improve your turnaround time to serve your community.

There is a short tutorial to set you off and each day you’ll be looking at your notice board. Here you’ll see the orders trickling in from neighbouring companies who want your creations freshly delivered to their door. During this hand holding portion of the game, you’ll be introduced to grabbing and putting your ingredients together. This is all grabbed from a shelving area and your recipe card will inform you of what you need for your mixture.

After you have all your raw ingredients in the bowl you’ll be transferring to the mixer to blend it altogether into a dough mixture. You need to keep an eye on timings to ensure that you don’t overmix. After this you’ll be moving the dough and dividing what you need into pieces. This part was very fiddly as you had to rotate the sticks to match up shapes and became pretty mundane to play. You can tell that this wasn’t ported very well across from the PC version. I would have preferred some better mechanics here of kneading dough instead of frustratingly using the analogue sticks to spin a wheel.

Then comes the baking procedure of traying up your dough and using the oven to bake it. Again, timing is key as the last thing you want is burnt products and waste. So ultimately once you get used to the control scheme, it is a test of precision and pacing. Delivering your gear in good time will earn you experience, revenue and will grow your reputation. You’ll want to wisely invest in upgrading equipment as you go along, time is everything in the baking industry. You’ll also want to keep an eye on stock inventory as you can and will run out of the important ingredients you need. Getting these delivered takes time and costs money for speedier deliveries.

Delivering can be automated but it doesn’t earn you as much dough. See what I did there? There is an option to deliver your fresh smelling loaves, buns and more via vehicle in the form of a mini game. Bizarrely this felt like an old school GTA as you career around the streets sometimes with some hurdles along the way. The objective is to get there in time with everything intact. The quicker the delivery, the more you’ll receive in time.

Visually Bakery Simulator didn’t look as dated as I was expecting. It has been on PC for a good 18 months and with most simulation games always edging on basic presentation, it was refreshing to see this look quite decent. You do have options to change the decor of the interior of your bakery as you get more cash in the bank to do so. This gives the player the option to tune the overall look to their own taste. As for the audio design, it is very minimal. As you can imagine, working in a bakery on your lonesome can be a quiet time.

Overall I enjoyed Bakery Simulator a lot more than I thought I would. It could have done slightly better in areas with the controls, but once you adjust to them it is tolerable. I was surprised the mechanics are pretty fluid especially when a lot of low budget sim games can be clunky. If you’re an achievement hunter then this one will please you as they come pretty thick and fast. I was a little deflated that the experience is a relatively short one, once you unlock everything there is little reason to continue. For the low price point though, it is worth it for a good 6 hours or so of fun.