And so, after lemonade business, sim cities, theme park, hospital, and even cruise ship tycoon games, the tycoon game series have come to the fairy-godmother-creating-sensation. Believe me, the first time I came across this game at Yahoo! games, I was like, “WTF?!?! Now we create fairy godmothers too?!”
Actually, the title of the game is a bit misleading. In this game, you don’t create fairy godmothers. Instead, you try to resuscitate Fairy Godmother’s dying Potions Empire due to lots of competitors trying to boot her out of the business. Maybe it should have been named Professor Snape’s Potions Tycoon game.
It’s the usual tycoon game: you apply the laws of supply and demand and try to balance all factors to attain the goals of each level, like earning this certain amount of net worth or booting out a competitor.
At first, I was a bit hesitant to try this game. It sounded so girly. But while that I’m only looking for a light PC game which will not demand too much of my time (or my money), I decided to give it a try. No harm in having a go at it since it has a free trial version which has all the features of the game but you could only play it for one hour.
So, here we go:
By the way, all the screen captures of the game are taken from a level that I’ve just finished. I wasn’t able to take screen captures of the tutorial anyway.
So, at the menu, it’s a choice between the Classic Game and the Happy Ever After Game. If using it for the first time, you have to start the Classic Game first. The Happy Ever After Game only gets activated once you finished a level in the Classic Game.
Here’s how your dashboard looks like. In making decisions for your Potions business, you have to consider news & weather (to forecast which curses you need to make potions for), supplies, pricing, marketing (if you want to hire sandwich-board carrying dwarves or Blaire the witch to cast curses upon villagers so they’d have to buy your potions), upgrades of your stores (if you want to increase storage or improve in-house entertainment), ask help from local characters, or to fund your research for the next new potion to market. Fairy Godmother is also there at the end of each business day to give you a general summary of how you did.
There are some graphs available too, like store popularity, customer satisfaction, number of customers, and business’ net worth, to aid you in assessing your business’ performance.
This is how the village looks like. It will look different as you progress to the different levels.
Honestly, I got the most fun in trying out the different goons used for “marketing” (hehehe, there goes my reputation out of the window…):
We’re not having a rally! We’re having a sale!
These are the sandwich-board carrying dwarves and the pop-up sale goblins. They just tell the villagers that you have a Potions store and that you’re selling. They’re harmless. They’re useful but not so much fun.
You buy our potions, or else, I pop your head…
Now, here’s the real goon. He’s the Persuasion troll. He grabs villagers and try to scare the hell out of them so that they’d go to your store and buy your potions.
Is this alien abduction?
This Magic Carpet is the sneaky goon. You place it near the competitor’s store and it actually steals away a competitor’s customer and fly the poor guy to your store so he’ll buy the potions he need there instead. I’ve actually placed it on the door of my competitor’s store and, as you can see in the picture, it has already spirited away one customer.
There are also other ways to try to outsmart the competitor, like using the corporate mole who tries to find out what new potions your competitor is researching and how long will it take for him to discover it yet or how much his potions cost. You could also hire freelancers to induce more curses especially if the weather forecast predicts that particular curse will be low that day. And, of course, there’s the loan shark whom you could borrow money from.
It’s a simple game really. It’s not for those serious gamers out there, but if you’re just looking for that leisurely game that you just want to play if you’re in a cafe waiting for somebody or if you’re just bloody bored in your bedroom, waiting for sleep to come, then I think this is your game. Actually, it can get quite addictive. Or maybe it’s just because I love games that involve selling and trading, like Sim Cities, Drug Dealers, Lemonade Tycoon, SimTown, and Beach Life….
…which reminds me, I’m getting too addicted with this Fairy Godmother Tycoon game and other new games in my phone that I already forgot about that health blog post that I’m supposed to write. However, I’m sure I’ll be back again to do another game sneak peek/review once I’m finished with the post and when I’ve already installed another game. Haha.
So, as for this Fairy Godmother Tycoon game, go to Yahoo! Games and download the free trial version. The Full Version cost $19.99 though (and I have the full version 
)
