One of the games I have fallen in love with on the iPhone is Chocolatier ($4.99), an incredibly addictive game in which you are a chocolatier who must sell chocolate around the world. You’ll visit factories and build concoctions of delicious treats, following ingredients to a tee in order to increase production of your coveted items.
Once your factories are making the chocolates, your job is to travel to the available cities on six continents to meet new people interested in trying out your foods or being offered missions that can get you rich or give you an arsenal of hard-to-find recipes. You may have to travel to far-away places to find ingredients that are local to a specific region. All the while, you will meet people along the way who can give you pointers and make those trips enjoyable.
Each city has a marketplace where you can buy these ingredients. Some of the prices will be exorbitant. You have the opportunity to haggle with the store owner, though keep this at a minimum; sometimes you’ll upset them and your prices will shoot through the roof. If you really want those almonds and the price is bearable, just buy a bit. (Then haggle, maybe.) Of course, when you return to the same city, the prices are flexible once again. (However, bear in mind that every trip to another city costs money, sometimes in excess of $1,000, so you might not want to haggle at all.)
You will also amass great chocolates made by your character as you travel, just as long as your factories are running and you have adequate ingredients. You’ll find that you can sell these items for high prices. Take heed to the tips in certain cities that specific products are in high demand (or that specific ingredients’ prices have plummeted) to take advantage of the biggest and best opportunities.
As you travel, you’ll collect some great recipes, all of which are sure to make your wallet get bigger and bigger, as harder-to-find recipes often mean that you’re creating rarer delights. From chocolate bars to truffles to infusions, those higher-priced items are more expensive (additions to your factory are not cheap) but you’ll reap the benefits in the end when you find out that a case of a rare infusion exceeds $2,000. If you have hundreds of cases on hand, you’re sure to see a substantial profit.
Further, it’s a lot of fun to just go to a factory and race against the timer to create the perfect recipe. It’s not as easy as it looks, as you have to memorize the ingredients and make sure that they get added to the mix. If you miss, you can break the machine!
It’s really hard to say what’s wrong with Chocolatier. Two elements of gameplay — creating the chocolates and going on worldwide missions — make this game killer fun. I’ve been thoroughly impressed. You get hours of gameplay packed into a really fun application that was made for those of us with sweet teeth (sweet tooths?). I remember during the first part of this game, I went through 2 bags of Hershey’s Kisses. My advice: stay away from real-life chocolate when you play!
