Freebie Focus: Lemonade Tycoon

The financial strategy game is by no means a new concept. There have been hundreds of games requiring you to carefully master the art of business, working your way from tea boy to tycoon in an accelerated, and often highly complex manner.

Lemonade Tycoon, despite its casual and jovial veneer, fits very comfortably into this genre. It’s a game that starts you off with nothing but an average product around which you’re expected to build an empire, and it’s quite unexpected how much fun that turns out to be.

It was a real surprise when EA turned up on the App Store with Lemonade Tycoon (for free) as we’ve come to expect only the biggest, flashiest, most over-promoted technological extravaganzas from EA, but a few minutes of vending drinks and it becomes clear how this game really does fit the corporate giant’s remit.

Much of the gameplay is built around preparation, as once the working day begins it’s really too late to be making marketing decisions, or buying supplies, or tweaking your lemonade recipe. At first this gameplay structure feels quite jarring, but a couple of days at the stand and the game really falls into place.

There’s no one aspect of preparation that’s more important than the others, but initially you’re well advised to get your lemonade recipe just right. The right amount of lemons, with the right amount of sugar and just enough ice to keep it cold and you’ll satisfy the burning thirst of your happy customers.

But on a hot day, you’re likely to need more ice to keep it cold (though adding ice waters the mixture down, be warned) so paying attention to the weather forecast is vital. Of course, on a nice day, people also flock to the parks and beaches, so renting just the right spot for your stand can mean you shift a lot more yellow swig.

Calamity! There’s a mosquito infestation at the park - bad for business - so shelling out a bit more and heading downtown where there’s a parade for the Mayor’s birthday could be just the marketing strategy you need. And at a big venue like this, it doesn’t hurt to throw a few quid into advertising to get people over to your lemonade stand.

The phrase lemonade ‘stand’ is rather ironic, as customers actually don’t like to be left standing. As your success grows you’ll need to hire staff and buy new equipment so you can pump out that lemony libation much faster.

Of course, after all this, there’s every chance the weather report was wrong, and it’ll chuck it down anyway and no one will be in the mood for pop.

So it’s not so much the lemonade that you’re selling as the considered decisions you make about how to sell it. If this was a stockbroker game, or was operating in millions of dollars rather than loose change, the extra scope would also add real weight to the events, and Lemonade Tycoon would suffer because of it.

What’s particularly great about Lemonade Tycoon is that the flippant nature of play ensures it always - above all - remains fun. Clearly it’s this jovial, casual nature that convinced EA to publish it in the first place, and in that respect the game is an overwhelming success.

It’s easy to get annoyed at the pop-up adverts that interrupt play, but a game of this quality and surprising depth would have been a bargain for the price of a jug of lemonade, so it’s hard to begrudge it the occasional product placement.

If you’ve found yourself taking to the likes of the online mafia games or other statistics-based strategy titles on the iPhone, or occasionally catch yourself watching The Apprentice on TV, Lemonade Tycoon was made just for you.