Blood Bar Tycoon is the first game released from Belgium-based indie studio Clever Trickster.  It’s your classic tycoon/simulated management style game but with a twist: You’re secretly catering to the vampire underbelly of the world and, with the help of your vampire minions, must turn your human customers into ‘cattle’ without anyone finding out. This isn’t an easy task though, as certain actions throughout your day (such as dumping corpses into the sewers) can attract unwanted attention, and you might find yourself with journalists trying to sneak into your storage rooms where you keep your blood coolers, or vampire hunters making their way into your ‘Vampire Only’ VIP areas armed with a crossbow and a dream.

The gameplay of Blood Bar Tycoon is simple. Set up a bar that appears completely innocent from the outside. Label rooms as “Vampire Only” so that the bloodsuckers have somewhere they can go without the delicious smell of humans tempting them to act out, and lure the same unsuspecting humans into your back room to drain them of their blood and turn that into different beverages for your vampire clientele. There are several ways to lure your cattle into their pens, including hiring minions who have hypnosis powers or using one of the many traps disguised as arcade machines or mirrors that feature trap doors that lead directly into a holding pen.

Each location gives you a different space to set up your bar and also has three stars to unlock as you progress. To reach that three-star rating you must complete several tasks per star. Some of these can’t be completed until later in the game when you unlock new machines, so I found myself going back and forth as I progressed. After getting your first star for a location, you’d unlock the next so it’s not a requirement to get all three stars, just something to keep you expanding and changing your bar to make it more optimal. As you progress through the areas and meet new Vampire Lords, you’ll also unlock a bunch of different design choices that let you decorate your bar in new ways and attract certain customers. The design of these customers is fitting of the bar design, such as the country bar design attracting cowboys and the cyberpunk design attracting customers in big yellow jackets (IYKYK).

I found my bar breaking out into panic really often. It was almost always a vampire who had made their way into the front half of the bar, the only part where humans were allowed, and deciding they preferred their blood fresh rather than tap. The game told me that if I didn’t keep my bloodstock under control, this was bound to happen, but even in bars I had made as optimal as possible with all different drink types accounted for, I was still having this issue. I’m not sure if some vampires are just programmed to party harder than others, or if this was an actual issue with the game. To fix a panic, you have a few options. Minions who had hypnosis powers could wipe the memory of those who had seen anything, Reaper minions could discretely eliminate journalists and vampire hunters, but you also had access to a black hole with tentacles that you could place under a human or hunter and have them swallowed whole. One issue with this was about halfway through my playtime, they started just… not doing that. They would get ‘consumed’ and my suspicion bar would go down, but they would still be there. Visibly, their character models wouldn’t disappear and I became soft-locked in panic mode.

Several times I would find service to be slow, only to realise one of my minions had become stuck at the bar and could not be interacted with at all until I physically moved the bar object out of their way. Customers would also get stuck in the doorway complaining about there being no empty seats when there would be full empty tables. Minions with hypnosis powers would pick a human to put under their spell but instead of leading them to a pen for processing they would just walk around the bar with them attached like a puppy on a leash. Most of these bugs were really quite minor but when they became stacked on top of each other in a really short amount of time, it became really difficult to keep playing enjoyably.

Something I’ve come to notice with tycoon games is that after a short while of playing, they start to become idle games. You set yourself up, be it with machines or workers so that you can fulfil a task, and then you just have to… wait. This isn’t necessarily a fault of the game, but more so a fault of the genre as a whole. It takes a lot for a tycoon game to really keep my attention and unfortunately, there wasn’t quite enough to Blood Bar Tycoon for it to do that. There’s not really a storyline, other than vague character interactions, locations and design styles being unique to certain Vampire Lords. Once I had reached three stars in a location, there was no need for me to ever go back there. I didn’t feel a great draw to go and rebuild my bar and make it as automated and optimal as possible, because I was already done, so to speak.

Overall, Blood Bar Tycoon fits the bill of what a tycoon/management sim is, just with a few too many minor issues and a gameplay loop that becomes pretty boring too quickly. In the future, it might be nice to see some content updates with new challenges to invite players back to bars and locations they’ve already moved on from. That said, during my review period, there have been several updates and hotfixes addressing bugs, and a few of the issues I mentioned appear to have been addressed and fixed.