As much as I want to like this game, my enthusiasm is capped at labeling it "competent." This game is an example of a good idea/ premise, but mediocre execution. It feels as though the developers only put in the minimal effort to get this game to launch, and that's never a good feeling. There's a lot of missed and unexplored opportunity to make the game more interesting.
Most of the effort seems to be poured into the game's rating system for improving your speakeasy. Each piece is furniture is given a star value which adds to your speakeasy's reputation and therefore your ability to buy quality products and attract quality drinkers. The furniture in question though is already pre-selected, meaning if you want a higher rating, you need to buy the furniture whether you think it's butt ugly or not. The only choice you have in aesthetics is for the colors of the walls, floors, and side paneling, none of which add to your rating level.
And speaking of the ingredients, it's not made clear just 'how' different levels of ingredients produce differing quality of alcohols. You can follow the little on-screen prompts, but it's never a for sure. I ended up having to just brute memorize which levels of what ingredients produced which quality of alcohol for each type. I guess this adds to a bit of realism, but it would be nice if they had a built in recipe book where you could catalogue what worked and what didn't. Otherwise, brewing turns into another tedious task of repetitive trial and error just so you can satisfy your low quality consumers.
My next critique is the employees you're able to hire, specifically the distillers. In this game, "The Mafia" essentially acts as an NPC organization where you can sell alcohol individually or wholesale. It ends up becoming the quickest (and weirdly) easiest way to make a buck. As you progress, you're able to unlock employees to help with the daily workload of helping your non-descript denizens get drunk. However, there's very little management to be done. The bartenders more or less cost, if not an outrageous, an unreasonable sum of money to employ per day. What's more, they'll simply walk away if you don't have enough money to pay them, but there's no notification to alert you. And if there is, I miss it every time. Next, the distillers are there to help you produce alcohol in your lab, but you can't delegate how much or what type of alcohol to produce. They'll just start invading your inventory and mashing the nearest ingredients you have on site. This is particularly irritating, as I think they're programmed to produce the highest quality available, meaning you're still left to produce the low quality of alcohol yourself unless you eliminate all the high quality ingredients from your lab. Lastly, you have a single runner at the front of your front selling cigars, though no one ever seems to buy one. He can be tasked with fetching ingredients, but his inventory slot is only half of yours, meaning again, a lot of the foot work is left up to you when you inevitably need more and more stuff. This could have easily been mitigated by making another runner available, or having a delivery system that allowed you to buy supplies in bulk so you weren't running around the city half the time. Depending on which store you need to go to as well, it's just faster to do it yourself.
Lastly, the entire atmosphere is lackluster. The scenery is cool, the outfits are cool, but the general feeling of being in a 1930's prohibition Americana feels like lip service at best. Police can chase you if you're carrying contraband, but you can literally outrun them in the game and wait for their alert meter to go away. What's more, there's no hard boundary on where they can go; I had a policeman chase me up into the Mafia headquarters, commandeer all my contraband, then walk away as if nothing happened, all in front of The Don. The customers that come by to take a load off certainly make themselves at home, as 'any' sitting furniture outside the bar is up for grabs. This makes it hard to feel like you're trying to run a sneaky and illicit operation when any joe schmoe can waltz right in and sit upon your three star couch you bought specifically for you. Because of these aspects, there seems to be a disconnect between trying to run a speakeasy, and 'feeling' like you're trying to run a speakeasy.
Finally, the game will literally become unplayable after a certain point. If you attempt to expand your bar out and fill it with high quality furniture, the game will stutter so bad you can't move. Closing the bar helps, but of course you can't make money that way. Like I said, it's as if the developers only put in the minimal effort to launch and didn't consider players actually buying and using all the high quality furniture made available to them.
Overall, it's not a bad game, but it's not great. It would benefit from an overhaul whereby players are given helpful and appropriate tools to satisfy the game's mechanics. Furthermore, the use of "The Mafia" as one of your customers seems very one note when the orders are almost always the same or there's never an inciting event or the employees they have available aren't actually that helpful.
It's fun for a few playthroughs, but still try to buy it on sale. If anything, it's a great example of how a game can have the potential elements to be good but still miss the mark.
4/10
