Alright, buckle up, boba fans, because we need to talk about Call of Boba. You know that feeling when you’re absolutely buzzing for a game, counting down the days, and then… thump… it lands with a bit of a dud? Yeah, that’s where we’re at.
Prefer to watch? Check out the video version of this review here
Call of Boba has been generating a decent amount of buzz for the past six months or so. I know I’ve had it on my wishlist for ages, really looking forward to playing it. It’s marketed as a boba tea shop simulation game. The concept is simple: you help run a boba tea shop, make drinks for customers, serve them, the usual.
Going into it, I was expecting a shop management game. Time management, crafting boba, serving customers, upgrading the shop – that kind of thing. But what we got wasn’t really that at all.
You start the game as a character who’s just been fired from their big city job. You go back home and meet up with your old friend, who’s taken over her grandpa’s boba tea shop after he passed away. So, the game starts, she gives you a place to live because you’re too embarrassed to go back to your parents, and you help run the tea shop. Basically.
There are some genuinely cool moments in the tutorial where you actually get to make the tea properly, with all the ingredients poured in. That part I really enjoyed. But from there, the actual shop management side is very, very basic and not really challenging in any way.
To make the teas, you grab a glass, put the ingredients in, and hand it to the customer. That’s pretty much it. There are no real challenges there. And the tutorial kind of leaves you wanting because it doesn’t really explain how to do anything clearly.
There’s a lot of trial and error in playing through this game, and a lot of things don’t really make a lot of sense. Now, aside from the tea shop part, you also explore the world, talk to characters, and uncover the story as you go. You learn more about grandpa and his secret room where he made the boba tea recipes. You find out more about your backstory, your friend’s backstory, and the town. That’s pretty much it. There’s not a whole lot to the game.
My favorite part of the game was actually the dream sequences, and it’s probably the part that just doesn’t fit with the game at all and feels really out of place. When you go to sleep, you wake up in this office, which I think is supposed to be your old job, and it’s essentially a dungeon crawler. You go around, you have like a boba tea gun, you take down these weird enemies, and you collect ingredients. It’s really weird. But that part was actually enjoyable, except it didn’t get progressively harder. It was kind of one set of levels, and that was it.
I played through about seven in-game days, and that was the only way I found to get more ingredients. The farming side of it is kind of mentioned, but then you don’t actually get any seeds to plant, and there’s no direction as to how to do that either. So I can see there’s a lot of potential for the farming side, but it’s just not there at the moment.
There are definitely some positive things about the game. The style is incredible. The artwork is incredible. It’s definitely cute and cozy. If the mechanics were there to support the design, this game would absolutely shine. All of the artwork and character designs are great. I really love seeing the cute axolotls and capybaras wandering around the town. And the music was really good too. It fit well. You felt like you were really in this world with all these animal creatures.
The vibe of the game is great, but I think the mechanics just don’t quite support it yet. I found a lot of the dialogue sections were cutscenes, so you couldn’t really interact. There wasn’t a whole lot of choice. You do have the option to skip them, but then you miss out on any information. And there’s no recap, and not really enough information in the quests to really give you what you need to know.
The controls and UI are very janky at the moment. It’s not really clear how to navigate through a lot of the menus. There are a lot of things where you have to hold a button down, or just click a button, or click on the screen. So it’s a little bit janky with the integration of the different controls and the UI.
I will say this game has launched in early access, so it’s absolutely not indicative of the final version. This very well could change, and hopefully it does. But at its current state, I would not call this game a shop management game. I would kind of call it more of an exploration sim, if anything.
I think this is one of those games that really, really has a lot of potential, and I’m definitely rooting for the developers and the game itself, because I think the concept is fantastic. The art style is fantastic, the music is fantastic. What they haven’t quite gotten right yet is the balance of the mechanics and the balance between the dialogue and story, and the shop management and making the tea.
I think one of the most important things to include in these shop management games, if you want it to be a shop management game, is the ability to interact with the story at your own pace, and that’s definitely missing from this game. I think story is really important and can definitely add a lot more atmosphere and depth to the gameplay, but there are always going to be players who just want to play the shop management side, and so that has to stand on its own, and the story has to be interactable at your own pace. In my opinion, that’s what makes a shop management game successful.
As it stands, Call of Boba just isn’t quite there yet. It’s got a ton of potential, but it’s just not quite there. I would definitely recommend picking this one up if you want to get in on a lower early access price, but this is the type of early access game that I would buy and not play until it comes out in 1.0, because it does need a lot of work and extra development to get it to the point where it’s really enjoyable.
I will definitely be eagerly awaiting the updates for this one because I really, really want to love this game. But at the moment, it’s not one that I would recommend playing.
You can check out Call of Boba on Steam here
Until next time, stay caffeinated!
