Casino Manager

The only good side of a casino to be on is the side where you are paying the wages, telling off the staff for taking too many cigarette breaks, and dealing with mountains of paperwork (i.e. counting all of the money that the public is seemingly desperate to volunteer).

It may not sound that glamorous, but it easily beats getting an impromptu face lift from Billy the bouncer for waging your imaginary yacht in a bout of high stakes poker. Essentially there are worse jobs than captaining a casino, but it's not all reclining in your Mediterranean get-away, and watching the pennies flood in.

There are staff to hire, facilities to run and gambling machines to buy and maintain. If all this hard work sounds like a hoot and you don't mind doing it without the enormous mountains of cash (and you possess an extreme tolerance of monotony), then Casino Manager has your name written all over it.

Upon loading a new game it's your job to steer a faltering gambling establishment back into the black. You're given a 30-day countdown to pay off your $5000 debt and clear a profit. This is done by choosing from a menu to buy new machines, install new facilities and hire new staff as and when the cash becomes available. Manage your resources effectively and the money will come cascading in quicker than you can say "licence to steal".

At the end of every virtual month you are given a break down on the financial comings and goings of your casino, before being set a new target debt to clear for the following period. Of course, in order to really start raking in the big bucks you need to expand, and judging when to expunge a huge chunk of cash on doing this is all part of the delicate balancing act of avoiding bankruptcy and keeping your customers happy.

The problem with this is that aside from deciding when to shell out for an expensive expansion, the way in which you are prompted to add facilities, casino games and hire staff is pretty linear, with virtually no scope for adopting a specific financial strategy.

Furthermore, the prices for everything are fixed, there is no haggling here and at times you will find yourself simply waiting for the dollar counter to rise high enough for you to make the next clearly required purchase.

Similarly restrictive is the fact there are no options to determine the layout of your casino and you're spoon fed the floor plan in much the same way as you are your expenditure.

Another annoyance is that opening the actions menu for any reason whatsoever pauses the game, meaning you can't navigate to the correct part of the menu to cue up your next purchase while you're waiting for your money to increase. This problem is only confounded by the fact the controls are slightly fiddly and often unresponsive (though this may vary from handset to handset).

With such a linear progression, your managerial skills are reduced to reacting to situations as quickly as possible in order to keep your customers happy. This consists largely of navigating to whichever machine is broken/customer is out of line and pressing either the '*' or the '#' key to bring out a technician or a bouncer, respectively.

Aside from that you do need to re-hire waitresses, janitors, bartenders and cooks from time to time but there is no strategy involved in doing so and before long you will start to feel like an overworked and under-appreciated floor supervisor, rather than a manager.

There is another mode in which you're given debt targets to beat in certain time limits but ultimately it is barely distinguishable from the main game in terms of goals and is dogged by all of the same problems.

For a game that takes place in a den of broken souls and euphoric luck, Casino Manager has a stark lack of personality. The front-end presentation is classy but some sort of minor backstory or the ability to name your staff would have gone a long way here. As would have some more complex problems, such as choosing whether or not to fire lazy workers or how best to deal with thieves.

Casino Manager is not a dreadful game, but it isn't a very good one and deals mostly in missed opportunity, lazy design and an overall feeling of detachment from the real workings of the casino. Not exactly what you'd call a high roller, then.