iPad Review: Winemaker Extraordinaire HD

Winemaker Extraordinaire HD is a game similar to Chocolatier, but with wine. Being somewhat of a Winelover Extraordinaire who’s previously played and enjoyed Chocolatier, I gave Winemaker Extraordinaire HD a spin. If you enjoy wine just as much as I do, I’ll just warn you now — you will get thirsty playing this game. Thirsty or having serious grapes cravings.

In Winemaker Extraordinaire, you play Maria Bellaventura, your typical casual game character who’s sick and tired of the corporate world. The recent passing of her grandfather leaves her with a wine company inheritance. Naturally, Maria quits her job and you resume her adventures in running a wine company with wineries set up all over the world.

Winemaker Extraordinaire is similar to Chocolatier in that it’s a sim game in which your job is to set up wineries, travel around the world on missions to find particular wine-making materials and fill orders submitted by a wine guild. The overall objective is to keep filling these wine guild orders until you’ve obtained the bits and pieces of a secret wine recipe.

3 different mini-games lend themselves to the process of winemaking in Winemaker Extraordinaire. One game in which grapes are squeezed in machine that you operate by adjusting the grape squeeze speeds and correctly matching grapes according to a blend recipe. Another game has you sorting grapes from leaves and twigs and another in which you plant grapes. Performing well in all of these games increases the efficiency of your winery. It’s not hard to maintain efficient wineries that produce a lot of wine on a daily basis since these mini games are incredibly easy to master. As your wine business grows, there’s an option to hire workers so you don’t have to bother playing the mini-games. You’ll find yourself quickly opting to hire workers as these games get really tedious.

Since the mini-games pose no challenge in gameplay, I found that the most challenging aspect of the game was the fact that not every city you travel to will have a supplier that sells the particular grapes you need to make a particular wine. A certain amount of effort is required in remembering what grapes each city on the map sells. Or, another tip is to just make note on a notepad for reference. Grapes and wine also vary in price around the world, but not to the same degree that they do in Chocolatier. When playing Winemaker Extraoridinare, you won’t find yourself getting jipped much for selling and purchasing items from different markets.

Graphics and sound are all excellent — you won’t find yourself having a hard time getting in the mood for wine. That aside, I only had some minor issues with the user interface. To make a wine selection in a winery, you need to scroll through every bottle to select the desired wine. Scrolling isn’t so much an issue until you start to acquire a lot of wines to produce at a winery. One suggestion to make wine selection less painless is to display them all at once in a window listing out all the wine icons. The same would’ve been nice for the blends area of the game dashboard.

Overall, the game is fun but a little too easy as it lacks challenges. I found myself a bit bored half-way through the game. I feel the game could’ve been more challenging if there were time limits on orders, obvious price differences across different markets and the ability to haggle like you can in Chocolatier.

I recommend this to anyone who is entirely new to sim games, wanting some practice in playing Chocolatier or just wants to educate themselves about wine. Winemaker Extraordinaire HD does a fine job in teaching you about wine.

For more information or to purchase, head here.