Well, that’s another Android game that I’ve marathoned through. It took me over ten hours to get to the ending, but there’s little to write about while playing Fiz, which should explain the lack of articles.

Fiz is kind of a skinner box

It really is. It doesn’t provide compelling or emergent gameplay. For the most part, you’re repeating the same set of actions over and over again, each time for bigger rewards. This is all wrapped into a nice and comfortable interface and slightly enriched with a clever, but shallow story and average-quality puzzles that are just barely compelling enough to get through.

You see, Fiz is a story about a brewing company finally defeating a rival brewing company and somehow taking the high road at the same time.

On the surface, it’s a simple simulation game. You brew bier, pick proper pricing and try to remain profitable. Once you figure out the principle, though, it’s very difficult to go under. The underlying mechanic is very simple, actually. You will be profitable and sell out all of your stuff as long as you follow a set of simple guidelines:

• Make the quality of your beer as high as possible.
• Try to offer beer at the market that actually wants that type of beer.
• Try to set the pricing so it’s affordable  to most of your customers.
• Look at the markup. It’s almost all about the markup. Customers can see your markup. They compare it to the competition’s markup and then factor in quality and their own desires. If you win in this comparison, you’re the one that gets the sale.

This sounds complex, but the principle is simple.

• Research a market and see what beer they want.
• Look at how much storage space they have.
• Produce the beer they want. Add points so you cover their storage space. Put the remaining points into quality or speed. Figure it out.
• Once it’s done, set the price so the markup matches with the competition.
• Look at your quality compared to the competition’s. Raise or lower your price a bit if you’re at an advantage or disadvantage.
• How did the sale go? Did you sell out. How long did it take for you to sell out? If you just barely sold out before the sale was over, then you guess the perfect pricing. If you sold out long before the sale was over, you can raise the prices on that market. If the batch expired before it sold out, you need to lower the prices. Just look at the sale screen.

So basically, you make a beer for a market that wants that beer and then just keep adjusting pricing until it’s optimal. Once yo do it, write it down and you know what to do on that market.

Of course, there are worse and better markets out there, so pick one or two or three and stick to those if you want to get as much money as possible.

The story complicates things

The story missions tend to mess with your plans, but only slightly. There are several objectives throughout the story where you have to get a certain amount of profit on a certain market. In that case, you simply pick that market and keep making beer for that market.

In the late game, you end up making faster than you can sell, so pick another market and alternate between those 2. Pick three if you have to.

There’s a special case of the Vaterland brewery. I can’t remember how much it was, but you need to make a certain amount of profit there. The problem is, it’s a special, seasonal market, where the popular beers change periodically. This means you need to do research for every season. The problem with Vaterland is that the seasons change every two months, so you’ll probably end up needing a year to do the research before you can actually start profiting. Well, you could do that, or you could simply look into the following list…

Fiz – Vaterland Brewery Seasonal Research

Months	Season	Beers
January, February	Winter	Hefeweizen, Dunkel, German Pilsner
March, April	Lenten Season	Doppelbock
May, June	Spring	Maibock
July, August	Summer	Helles
September, October	Oktoberfest	Oktoberfest
November, December	Winter	Hefeweizen, Dunkel, German Pilsner

There, I just saved you a year of gameplay. Take a look at how long it takes for your guys to brew a batch and try to brew it so it’s just about done when the appropriate season starts.

There’s another thing to note about researching seasonal markets. It doesn’t matter when you started the research – it only matters when the research completes. This means you can do the cheaper research that takes longer. Just start the research at slightly less than a month before the season changes and you’ll get it just as it does change.

Final few

In any case, once I’ve completed the last few qurests, all that was left was the brew the ultimate cure-all brew – Fiz. This was also a quest where I had to find the recipe for it and then gather the required ingredients by completing a different smaller quest for each ingredient. Fur progeny, here are the ingredients and the requirements for them:

• Key to Friendship – gained by completing Eddie’s Brewdega. You just need to buy the special quality-increasing ingredients and put them in the brew to make it good enough.
• Symbol of Pride – this is the Uprum Champion’s Pendant, which you’ll probably already have by the time this quest becomes available.
• Prehistoric Yeast – Z start’s selling this thing eventually, for 25.000 gold.
• Banshee’s Tears – Sell the proper bear to the Banshee at the Twelve Bells location. What’s the proper bear? Look at all the types available on that market. There’s only one type missing, so brew a beer of that type and put it on the market.
• White Bee’s Honey – The quest A Riddle too Sweet gives this ingredient. The guy giving you the riddle wants what Germans drink in the Spring. The above table should help you with that.

With all those ingredients and the recipe, completing the final quest is just a matter of making a few clicks and then waiting a few months.

I was given a moral choice once I brewed Fiz, went with the good option and that was pretty much it.

New Game+

Yup, we have a New Game+, and I probably won’t be playing it. In a new game, you get to keep your old employees and (I believe) recipes and that’s about it. You also get to unlock a few extra secrets, including an amazing secret employee.

I don’t think I’ll be playing New Game+, though. Though it’s slightly more complex than  the usual Kairosoft game, Fiz is still a simulite, not a proper simulation game. The drive to play it comes from buying upgrades and going through the story. I did all that, so the only drive remaining is to get that last employee and complete the last few achievements. For me, that’s not a big enough drive to invest another ten hours.

With a proper simulation game, the game itself would be the drive, but we don’t have that, sadly. I wish we did, but we don’t.

That being said, for a buck it cost me, this was a pretty cool little game. It was well worth my money and the time I’ve spent with it.

Related Posts:

• Fiz [1] – An Excellent Kairosoft Game
• Game Dev Story [5] – Character Data
• Game Dev Story [4] – Good Combos, Bad Combos
• Game Dev Story [3] – New Game Plus
• Game Dev Story [2] – Game Over for Sunny Studios