The Brew Barons

It's very easy to get lost in the game world. It's incredibly well realised and owes a lot to former open world RPGs for it's gameplay. Fundamentally, your mission is to raise the fame of the Brew Barons as this will put the pirates out of business. If you've played games like Democracy, you'll be familiar with how little things can impact your progress, and with Brew Barons, while it's not complex per se, you can easily get carried away and find yourself in dire straits afterward. For instance, if you choose to battle the pirates, you'll have a great time learning all the pirates' weaknesses, or if you complete lots of quests, you'll raise your fame dramatically relative to your performance at the brew-making business. Higher fame brings more difficult challenges, harder pirate fights, and more complicated contracts for brews with rarer ingredients; all of which push your costs up—costs you aren't able to make if you neglect the brewing side of the business. On the business side of things, the basics of making money are... 1) get a publican to order something from you. They'll give you a base ingredient and drink type, then it's up to you to find the ingredients and a recipe to use. 2) Create the best quality recipe you can to maximise profits. 3) Go out and collect the ingredients. If you are asked for rarer ingredients, you'll need to buy upgrades to collect them. 4) Go out and seek recipes. If you can only make 1 or 2 star recipes, you'll not be thriving in the long run. 5) Make the brews. Deliver. Refuel. Repair. There's a lot more to do besides flying about. There's some simple management activities to do with your employees who all perform well enough at flying but some prefer marketing or foraging and award bonuses to for instance yield or contact length. Each of the barons has a loyalty mission which are fun distractions like launching fireworks or retrieving a pirate gunship. Planes can be heavily modified. You can attach a good selection of silly and useful things, for instance, I installed a set of pontoons which distribute advertising fliers which raise your fame but occasionally cause you to get fined—which ultimately led to be being in debt to the bank for the princely sum of 26 pence. Pirates deserve a special mention. Each island can have a pirate presence ruining the landscape for a while and making it impossible to stop in towns. You can of course fight them off. Each of the larger bosses plays like a puzzle. At 0 fame, the solution is really obvious, but as your fame increases, so do the pirates' defences. The same boss at 3 fame will have developed countermeasures; they'll do more damage, have new mechanics, or an escort of smaller vehicles to defend them. Going up against a boss for the first time at 5 fame isn't a great idea as you'll be shot down all the quicker for the extra difficulty while still being unsure of how to even approach it. There are other surprises to find, but I shalln't spoil further. This game is perfect for winding away rainy afternoons, when you'd rather be touring the Carribean.