Moonshine Inc – Review

Like a Meerkat in the desert, I’m always looking around for new management and simulation games to sink my teeth into, but it’s not often I see a truck full of moonshine racing towards me.

After heading to the big city and making some dodgy business decisions with the wrong crowd, in Moonshine Inc a police raid while you’re away forces you to stay out of town and build a new business empire, thanks to your trust great uncle, Moonshine is the order of the day, so it’s time to throw some ingredients into a bowl and create your own dodgy alcohol to sell in the local area.

You’ll start off with a base in one of a handful of areas, where you’ll first grab a few pieces of equipment and sugar to create your first drink, after working through various other steps, you’ll eventually bottle up your new beverage before heading out to deliver it.
As you create more successful recipes, you’ll open up a wider range of equipment and ingredients as your moonshine empire slowly grows from strength to strength.
You’ll also have to be mindful of threats such as the local police force who are always happy to busy up an illegal operation, but the fear of your operation getting closed down, never felt as strong as it could have been.

The overall presentation is a little hit and miss, there’s a top-down view which leaves things awkward to see, or you can zoom in closer and see your workers wandering around the base performing various moonshine-brewing activities, zoomed in so close is something I’d only really use in titles like Cities Skylines or Planet Coaster to see how individuals go about their day-to-day lives, but with Moonshine inc, they’re not the best animations and unfortunately I found myself still defaulting to this view for everything apart from placement of new items.

What’s equally disappointing is it just feels last gen at best, I’ve even included two screenshots from the Nintendo Switch version, and most people would probably think the Xbox & PC screenshot look even worse.

From buying ingredients to delivering those orders, there’s quite a few steps to creating moonshine and while there’s a full tutorial to take you through each section, including how to buy and use new equipment, it’s sadly a little overwhelming, especially when you’re tasked with recalling everything you’ve done, it all feels like walking into a large examination with only 5 minutes to revise.

You’ll also find quite a few menu’s to work through, and the overall control scheme just doesn’t feel very intuitive, one minute I’m pressing X, the next the B button, and there’s no double a better menu system, with areas under tabs would have worked far better than menus thrown across various buttons and switching from a icon select menu to a radial menu .

I did really enjoy the idea of creating my own concoctions, fine-tuning recipies, and then selling for massive profit, and the core gameplay loop is definitely available, but with so much convolution around menus, overall delivery and presentation it just feels like the digital recreation is far more difficult than it needed to be.

With enough patience and perseverance, there’s certainly some rewarding management gameplay underneath and over on PC with mouse and keyboard it’d be far easier to navigate, but on the Xbox, with a a little too much text to read, the confusing deliver and constant menu-jumping just doesn’t create enough flavour to make this a tipple worth sipping.
I feel like I’ve been harsh within this review, but for all the hoops you need to jump through, there’s just not enough end product and like a dodgy bottle of moonshine, the end result is a little hard to swallow, leaving a sour taste in the mouth.

About Author