Happy Elements Takes to Bartending with Lounge Bar on Facebook

It’s been some time since we've seen anything from social developer Happy Elements. In fact, it has been a while since we caught wind of any major apps out of China as a whole. However, the social game maker is doing quite well with its new virtual space/business title 開心 Lounge Bar, which appeared in our fastest-growing Facebook games list last month. Currently, the Restaurant City’esque title has 1.1 million monthly active users running virtual bars. Filled with the features that made the Playfish game popular, Lounge Bar has the right elements for growth. However, quality is also a major issue, and many aspects of the game feel a bit too inspired by its predecessor. Unfortunately for us, the game is pretty much entirely in Chinese (save part of the title), but it is still easy enough to figure out. The theme is similar to Bar Society, in which the objective is to build up a successful bar. Unlike that game, however, Lounge Bar feels a bit more like a classy metropolitan lounge than a typical bar, hence the name. Using themselves as an avatar, players assign themselves and their workers various jobs such as waiting tables, cleaning, or mixing drinks. Like most business oriented virtual spaces, customers file in to purchase drinks. Should they receive them in a timely manner, the rating of the bar will go up, which, in turn, equates to more paying patrons. Like in Restaurant City, customers having to wait too long for service, trash on the floor (trash appears while the user is logged off), and insufficient seating will lower the rating. The biggest impact to ratings are wait times for drinks, which can be alleviated by adding decorations and hiring friends to work for you. Unfortunately, the game takes a step backwards socially with that feature, as it requires the friend to start playing the game before the user can hire them. In most virtual space games like this one, friends can be hired regardless. Other social elements are still intact though, such as the ability to trade ingredients for new drinks. This is prudent as these aren’t all that easy to come by. Thus far, we’ve gotten new ingredients for logging in daily and completing various “tasks”, one of which was to upgrade a particular drink on the menu. The menu itself, sadly, feels pretty much identical to the original Restaurant City in that players serve different types of drinks, upgrade them to make them worth more, must collect ingredients to make them, and can even post to their feed asking for ingredients. More than this, it just feels the same visually, down to the user interface elements. As a matter of fact, many UI elements in Lounge Bar feel taken from Restaurant City. We'd estimate that over half the game derives from the Playfish title, including some of the décor (which if not a direct copy, is still very close). Even the “hire a friend” menu is the same, as well as the exterior 2D street of bars that represents the player’s and their friends’ virtual spaces. Even the shack “invite” buildings are there. As for the décor, there is actually a massive volume of items one can decorate with. The app does have items, such as dividers and toilets, that are identical to Restaurant City, but it also has some very unique ones such as scuba divers, hula girls, and giant coral. Overall, it does provide a very wide palette of decorative potential. On the social side, the hiring of friends has already been mentioned, but there are other, more minor aspects, such as the gifting of a round of beer, although it’s hard to say if this has any real benefits beyond normal gifting. Annoyingly, friends are also needed to expand one’s bar (in addition to level and money), so Lounge Bar effectively penalizes players whose friends choose not to play. Lounge Bar is still doing well, and continues to grow. Regardless, it’s disheartening to see what amounts to a cloned app, rather than any effort at innovation. In the end, Lounge Bar is technically a “good” game, since it's cloned from one, but it certainly isn’t an original one.

Social Pro Daily

Happy Elements Takes to Bartending with Lounge Bar on Facebook

Christopher Mack

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Christopher Mack