Lemonade Tycoon

There's a famous phrase that says, if life hands you lemons, make lemonade. We'd like to add to that if life also handed you paper cups, sugar, ice cubes, a little stall and a spot on the side of the street then you're in business! And that's exactly what Jamdat's popular strategy title has in store for you.

Starting out with little more than $20 and a spot on the sidewalk (this is an American title, folks) your task is to buy supplies (basically lemons, sugar, ice and cups), decide upon a recipe that will be sweet but cost effective, set your prices, maybe do a little advertising and then try to sell as much lemonade as you can. Manage to succeed on your local street by building up a regular clientele of satisfied customers and you can then look at hiring out a more expensive but possibly more lucrative pitch in the park, city or even at the beach. You'll also be able to invest in your business with machinery (from tills to ice-makers and even new stands) that will enable you to more lemonade more rapidly, keep your ingredients fresher and generally rake in more cash.

The game itself is split into two sections. The back-end management bit is where you'll spend most of your time and make most of your decisions. Although there's a surprising amount of flexibility to play with, the interface is well designed and allows you to use either your phone’s thumbstick or number key shortcuts to quickly set supply levels, recipes and upgrades until you're ready to hit the street. At which point the game switches to a security-camera eye's view of your stand and you get to watch customers wander past, stopping (or not – maybe you need to advertise more!) and commenting on your wares via mini speech bubbles so that you can see if people are happy with the recipe or dislike the taste, cost or price of your drinks.

Whilst this is interesting to watch on your first few days and essential when you move to a new pitch, it can become quite repetitive so you'll soon be reaching for the 'speed up' button or maybe even skipping it completely in order to get to the all important statistical tally of the day’s trading showing how many cups were sold, how satisfied your customers were and, crucially, how much moolah you've made. Then it's back onto the management screen to make any appropriate tweaks in time for the next day's trading.

There is a little bit more to it than this, though; for starters there are 2 distinct game modes, an open-ended career which allows you to experiment and accumulate wealth as you conquer different locales and collect everything available, and a more focused (and our preferred) 30 day challenge tasking you with simply making as big a profit as you can within a month. Whichever game mode you chose, elements such as popularity and satisfaction in each area effects your sales and there's also a weather forecast to consider, although to be honest some of these factors seem to have a far smaller influence than you'd think. Capitalists that we are, we thought we’d hike up our prices and water the recipe down on a hot day, but the strategy didn't really pay off in practice and we ended up not varying our recipe at all after that, just edging up the price when we went to locations with an older clientele.

What's more there's less variety in gameplay here than there could be. Once you've toiled to upgrade your equipment and tried out a few locations, the process of checking supplies and then skipping through to the results sometimes feels a little too much like hard work to be fun. So, whilst Lemonade Tycoon is undoubtedly refreshing and will help to perk up a good few days, by the end of the week it'll begin to fall a little flat.