Nightclub City: Energy changes game drastically, good or bad?

If you play a lot of games on Facebook, you've probably already experienced the energy mechanic in games like Treasure Isle, Pirates Ahoy, It Girl, or FrontierVille. Now, Nightclub City is the latest game to join the club (pun definitely intended) and use energy as the main driving mechanic in their game. Unlike other games which have added a decorative item that uses energy (such as the coffee machines in Cafe World), Nightclub City has completely revamped the game to integrate energy into the core experience. Could this be a bad thing?

Now, all players have 20 energy to spend doing activities in their club. Almost everything costs energy, from doing bartender tricks and dedicating songs to your clubgoers. Once you run out of energy, you really can't do anything in the game. Players are already complaining about this change because it means they're now severely limited on what they can do in their club without paying money or waiting for energy to regenerate. Energy can be purchased for Facebook Credits of course, or it will naturally come back over time. One good thing is that you can now start parties instantly without needing Facebook Credits - you just use your energy.
Nightclub City

Another change is the addition of Luxury. Luxury is a new meter that controls how much your drinks cost, and it goes up based on how good your club looks. Buying fancier decorations will increase your luxury and therefore your profit from packing a full house. There is also a ton of information when you click on your quests, including four meters - Happiness, Tip Rate, Fights Started, and Pukes. You can kick people out who are causing trouble or throwing up, and dedicate songs or give VIP status to people who aren't happy.

This feels a bit risky at this stage in the game for Nightclub City, but we can't deny that these changes make sense. It's now more fun and makes more sense to interact with guests. It feels like there is a point to doing things within your club, whereas before it didn't feel like anything had much of an effect. Energy is a proven mechanic that sells well and should do well for Nightclub City as long as the existing playerbase doesn't feel too alienated or shocked by this change. Nightclub City is a great game, so we wish it the best and look forward to watching the community reaction to these changes.

Run your own bar with Bar World by DNA Games

Bar World is a brand new game that launched early this month that allows players to create their own bar. It was developed by the stealthy DNA Games, and this is their first released game on Facebook after receiving 2 million dollars in funding. At first glance, the game has all the right pieces to be successful. It is cute, very polished, and easy to understand. Not to mention, who doesn't want to create drinks and serve customers?

We took a peek at this brand new game, and give you the full details after the break.



While installing the game, we thought it might be similar to a game like Nightclub City, but it actually plays much closer to Baking Life or Cafe World. Instead of just running a club and attracting customers, you run mixing machines and create drinks. The bar has drink recipes for beer, liquor, and wine, and you make these drinks in machines by clicking on them and serve them on counters when they're ready. Recipes have different lengths of time to make, and give out different profits and XP for making them. Your bar has an overall experience level, and you also have a popularity level which increases by visiting and helping out friends, and a bar rating that is increased by buying decorations for your bar and giving your customers drinks.

We love how this game has a cute art style, but a more adult content to it. The fact that you are making real mixed drinks such as Gin and Tonic, Mint Juleps and Mudslides and that you can serve IPAs and Merlots adds an element to the game that makes it feel like something an adult would play. It almost feels "cool" to play this game and serve drinks to your customers. After all, who doesn't want to be a bartender at some point in their life?
Bar World Drink Menu

The similarities to Nightclub City begin with the ability to micromanage your customers and buy them drinks. You can also play matchmaker and connect your friends with each other. Another similarity to Nightclub City is that you can change the music and pick different tracks to play. Bar World also has locations that allow you to move your bar to different areas such as the Paradise Beach, Downtown, or the Mountaintop. These locations are unlocked through increasing your popularity or paying Bar Bucks.
Bar World Drinking Game

One new innovative social and viral feature is the ability to play drinking games with friends. You can play games like Rock Paper Scissors which sends a request to your friend telling them to accept a request in order to play with you. If that won't cause installs for Bar World, we don't know what will.

Overall, this is a great new contender in the Facebook games space. It's obvious to us that DNA Games spent a lot money on this highly polished game and we think it will pay off for them. Bar World currently has 83,000 monthly active users and a high rating of 4.8 out of 5 from players so far.

Play Bar World on Facebook >