Pizza Connection 3 (PC) Review

If you have ever played a tycoon game, Pizza Connection 3 should all be familiar territory; you will be aiming to complete a certain objective, and you are given tools to make the money to further your operations and reach that goal. There is the bog-standard plot about inheriting your family's legacy for pizza making while also finding out family secrets, but it's just a vehicle to transition players into a variety of missions to pull off, such as selling a number of pizzas in a certain amount of time, making a specific amount of money, and so on.

It seems like these would be good ingredients for a tycoon affair, but that's unfortunately where things start to fall flat. Balance is crucial to making a great title in this genre, but it's something Pizza Connection 3 severely lacks. Oftentimes, sales will be doing so well that you don't even have to do anything at all (which isn't exactly entertaining), or they will plummet at an absurd rate instead. Despite all the graphs and charts offered, it normally ends up being frustratingly unpredictable.

What certainly doesn't help is how difficult it is to find out why any of this is happening in the first place, due to the fact that what the game tells you isn't always accurate to what is actually happening. All of your restaurants can be closed for the night, only for the money counter to mysteriously increase anyway. Employees sometime disappear during their shifts entirely, chefs will occasionally have no idea where they are supposed to go (even if you have the smallest restaurant ever), and even more examples beyond this come to mind when this is brought up.

That said, this all leads to the biggest problem with Pizza Connection 3 as a whole, which is its lack of polish. The game is riddled with bugs and glitches, some of which are (thankfully) only cosmetic but many of which have a serious impact on the gameplay. The more you play, the more it becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate. Even the pre-set restaurant given early on into the story mode has some of its chairs placed incorrectly, making it impossible for customers to sit there until you personally rearrange it (this moment isn't mentioned in any tutorials, either, meaning it's most likely unintentional).

It is worth noting that the developer has stated it is working on fixes for many of these bugs, but those statements aren't going to impact the state the game is in right now; it's perfectly possible that Pizza Connection 3 will be mostly bug free in a year from now, but the release has not yet reached that state, nor is that the version of the game that is being reviewed right here, right now. Perhaps this would all be more understandable if this was in Early Access, but since it isn't, well...

There are still some positives, though. The aforementioned pizza creator, in particular, is well done, and enjoyable to experiment with. There are dozens and dozens of ingredients to mess with (even if certain ingredients, such as maggots, are… questionable), customisable pizza shapes, different ingredient sizes, and so on. It leads to there being lots of room for experimentation, and if you are someone who couldn't care less about that sort of feature, there are pre-made recipes to be used instead, so you are not absolutely forced to use the system if you don't want to.