Julie’s Sweets from Ocean Media is a colorful, fast-paced time management game on Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our Julie’s Sweets review!
In Julie’s Sweets, you play as the titular Julie and are tasked with creating what your customers order so that you can please them as fast as possible. You will sometimes be able to just take a product from the available stock as is and give it to your customers since that’s what they want, but most of the time you will need to combine things or make use of your kitchen appliances to make it all work out. You will also need to keep items in stock and ready to go, so be ready for it!
If you make your customers wait, they won´t be happy about it and might not leave a tip after you finally serve them – and if you’re not fast enough they might just decide to leave! And on top of serving them you will also need to work the register to collect the money clients will provide for the cost of the meal, as well as any tips they might leave you. And as if that wasn’t enough, you will also need to clean up the tables! You can also hire a cleaner to help out by doing exactly what the name suggests it can do.
You won’t go into this one blind since Julie’s Sweets will get you going with a short story intro, followed by a tutorial that will do its best to teach you the basics. It is here that you will learn how as soon as a customer walks through the door you should be ready to notice their order, grab what is needed to complete it, deliver it as quickly as possible, collect their payment at the cash register, and do it all over again. You might sometimes need to deliver one order after another so that your customers don’t get angry, collecting some payments in-between so that everyone is happy.
If you want to boost your score, you can try and check out several customers at the counter at once, delivering all products in a customer’s order at the same time, doing a combo in which you deliver several orders to customers within a short window of opportunity, as well as serving your customers as quickly as possible. And then more products of the same type you serve to customers, the more product alternatives you will be able to unlock! This will allow you to have more variety when trying to select your menu before beginning a stage.
For each stage, you will be rated with one, two, or three stars depending on how much money you managed to earn. The more happy customers you have, and the better you are at applying the advice provided in the preceding paragraph, then the bigger your final payday will be! And if you didn’t manage to get a three-star rating in a stage, you can always replay when you want to so that you can take a shot at improving your overall score. Once you’ve played more of the harder stages, you will gain the expertise needed to make the grade in the earlier ones.
Oh, and each stage has a challenge for you to complete so that you can earn a heart! Each stage has a different challenge, so you’ll always be trying to do something different. This does mean that you might not be able to get a three-star rating and complete a challenge during the same run, but if you give it your all you might be able to complete both objectives! Hearts are used to purchase collectibles in the collectibles menu, which you can access by pressing the Y button. In here you will find trays, mittens, pots, molds and more that you can purchase with your hearts to spice things up around the kitchen.
The game offers three difficulty settings. There is Beginner in which clients will be a bit more patient and a cleaner will available during more tasking stages. Normal offers the regular experience for the game, with clients that have a moderate amount of patience, with the traditional challenge you might expect. The last one is Expert in which you will need to stay on top of things and always be on high alert since customers won’t have much patience, and there is no cleaner to aid you.
You can also aim at getting some trophies for your efforts, for completing a set of 21 tasks, such as making 250 combos, walking 1,000 miles, serving 500 donuts, restocking 300 items, finding all 60 cats in the game (there’s one cat that will show up in each stage as you play, which you can collect to gain bonus money), for completing each chapter in the game (each chapter has a set of ten stages for you to work on), serving 300 standing customers, serving 400 seating customers, and more.
Julie’s Sweets is a fun and fast-paced time management game in which you’re always on the run trying to server all of your customers as quickly as possible so that they leave with a smile. Because of this, I found that using the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen while playing made it easier for me to go from one task to the next way faster than by using the Joy-Con for physical input, but your mileage may vary. It’s not a game that breaks any new ground, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fun budget release at $9.99 that you should give a try if you’re a fan of the genre.
Disclaimer
This Julie’s Sweets review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Ocean Media.
