Who doesn’t like pizza? Weirdos, that’s who. ‘Pizza Slice’ by developers Quest Craft and Gaming Factory have created a neat little Pizzeria simulator that is oozing with charm like the mozzarella bubbling on a fresh slice.

Starting with the Campaign mode, you play as Tonio, fresh from Italy, inheriting a pizza shop from the more hopeless relative, Alfonso. He has tried to look after it since Grandfather’s death, but it isn’t going very well, and the place is now a run-down tip. It is now your turn to turn ‘Stefano’s Pizzeria’ back into the thriving and bustling restaurant of its glory days and muscle out the competing soulless chain pizza shop trying to take over down the road.

The story is decently written and animated, but I found it very easy to complete, with it all culminating after 20 in-game days or about 10 hrs of gameplay. I enjoyed, though the short, interactions with the brawny, albeit friendly Sicilian mob and the competitiveness with Greasy Giant Pizzas. I do really wish they had extended their storylines, especially with the mob, as they could have been really fleshed-out characters.

Much of this mode has you running an individual store and keeping customers happy enough to come back and raise your revenue. How do you keep people coming back? Well, to cook awesome pizzas, which firstly need ingredients.

Next door, there is a general store that opens at 7 am, full of non-perishable ingredients for making dough and other uses and a marketplace that opens at 8 am, teeming with meats and fresh produce. The possible combinations are endless.

Delivering these to your restaurant, you are given a range of tools to create your round discs of delight. You have a mixer to create dough and a board to roll it out and shape it into a perfect circle. On the bench, you can also place a chopping board to slice and dice your ingredients to put in Bain Maries.

These can be put into the toppings station on the other side of the kitchen. Tucked away nicely, too, is a wood fire where you must shuffle your pizza into to bake, but watch the cooking bar that times it as no one likes a burnt pizza.

You can follow recipes too to make some authentic classics, but more creatively, you can have free range create your own custom pizzas and add them to your menu. I particularly loved this and made some expensive and weird pizzas.

There are also two other modes, which are nice to see. Unfortunately, though, the Multiplayer is not ready on launch, which is disappointing as I think the game could be really chaotic with a friend. More curiously, there is a really innovative mode called ‘Inferno Kitchen’, which reminds me of an Australian 2000s TV show, ‘Ready Steady Cook’.

Here you can compete 1v1 or in teams against people online to serve as many customers and keep them happy as you can. I was very excited to play this mode, but unfortunately, the online pool at the time of writing is very small, so I could not find a single game to test it out over a plethora of servers. The trailer, though, makes it look very stressful and manic, so hopefully I get to play it sooner rather than later.

While the graphics are charming, I did experience a few graphical, gameplay and dialogue glitches. Sometimes the flowers would not load, leaving giant pink outlines where they should be. Other issues experienced could be that items on the pizza would not remove or that Alfonso would not wash dirty plates.

Lastly, whole lines of dialogue would be missing during a competition with the competing franchise, Greasy Giant Pizzas, with codes such as dialogue_competition_loss appearing instead. Not hugely game-breaking, but not what you want to see in a finished product.

At the moment, Pizza slice feels pun intended, only half-baked. I see the potential and put in significant hours to finish the campaign, but it was disappointing to see that Multiplayer wasn’t ready for launch, as I would love to scurry around the kitchen with others. With a few glitches smoothed out like sauce in the pan and modes giving you more to bite into, this could be one tasty morsel of a sim.

Written by: Stacey