Pizza Slice (PC)

Details: Category: Computer; By Dana Schwanke; 22.May; Hits: 996

Game Info:

Pizza Slice
Developed By: Quest Craft, Gaming Factory
Published By: Gaming Factory, Ultimate Games S.A., Ultimate Publishing, PlayWay S.A.
Released: March 13, 2026
Available On: Microsoft Windows
Genre: Simulator, Cooking
ESRB Rating: N/A
Number of Players: Singleplayer, 2-player co-op & duels
Price: $14.99

Thank you Ultimate Games for sending us this game to review!

Christ Centered Gamer has been absolutely flooded with "simulator" games to review lately, especially various types of shop simulators. I just recently wrote up reviews for both Pawnbroker Simulator and Exotica 2: Pet Shop Simulator. While both of these games were fun in their own ways, they both suffered from some of the same things: bugs, uninspired and sometimes unpleasant graphics, and music that ranged from bland to unbearable. Pizza Slice, in contrast, has very stylized graphics and music and a satisfying gameplay loop, but still suffers from some bugs.

In Pizza Slice, you play as Tonio, an Italian man whose grandfather recently passed away and left ownership of his pizza shop in America to you. You fly to America to run the store in his stead, alongside your cousin Alfonso. Alfonso is there mostly to teach you the ropes and get your shop into trouble. With his guidance and your efforts, you get the opportunity to run a pizza shop in a busy little town.

The campaign has three difficulty settings: "Dulce Far Niente", "Piano Piano", and "Mamma Mia!", which I thought was a funny touch. It takes place over a series of X days (I haven't finished it yet). Each of the first few days begins by introducing more mechanics, such as altering the menu, creating your own custom pizzas, and upgrading your store. The overall gameplay loop mostly revolves around prepping and serving pizza, as well as going out to shop for ingredients and upgrades. Unlike most shop simulators, this one actually requires you to leave the store and go to the others around town to purchase the things you need.

Once you have the ingredients, you will have to actually make the pizza: Make the dough in a mixer, stretch it out, sauce it up, chop the toppings manually, add the toppings, bake it, and serve it. Customers eat at the tables in the shop, and you will need to bus their plates and take their money before the table can be used by the next customer. You will also need to wash the plates and mop the floors. It's a lot of moving parts, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. If you have ever played either of the Overcooked games, the things the game asks of you in the kitchen will feel very familiar, except that prepping ingredients is a lot more manual than simply clicking "X" and standing at a station while your little character does their task. You can even dash like the characters in Overcooked.

Customers will pay and tip based on how well their pizza is made. Not only does each pizza need the proper ingredients, but they need to be laid out in an appealing way; have the exact numbers of each ingredients, including the correct proportion of sauce; and be baked for the correct amount of time. Pizza Slice did not do a great job of explaining the sauce part; if a pizza calls for "90" tomato sauce, it means 90% of the pizza needs to be covered in sauce. Using too much or too little sauce will dock a star from your score. But nothing is worse than a burnt pizza: customers will outright refuse to pay for a pizza that has been in the oven too long.

Time management is critical, because the stores, including your own, are only open during set hours. The upgrade stores and the dry goods store all open an hour before the pizza shop, but the market where you buy toppings only opens after your shop is open. If you run out of ingredients in the middle of the day, you're going to have to make a mad dash to the store and supermarket sweep a ton of ingredients just to keep the food flowing. Of the main gameplay loop, this may be the one major complaint I have; it never feels like there is a safe moment where you can calmly peruse your options to find what you need. You're almost always on a time crunch of some kind. And if you have to rush to go do something important with a pizza in the oven, unless you want to remake that entire pizza, you had better be back on time.

Alfonso is there to help, but he won't actually do any of the real work himself, through one of the most serious cases of weaponized incompetence I've ever seen in a video game. It's severe enough that Tonio's grandfather strictly charged both of you to never let Alfonso near a knife in the kitchen. Instead, he can be instructed to mop the floors, do the dishes, or, once per day, go outside and do some marketing.

Highlights:

Strong Points: Fresh take on the simulator genre; decent balance between customization and simplicity; graphics and music stand out from other store simulator games
Weak Points: Some major, game-breaking bugs
Moral Warnings: Your shop gets accosted by the Mafia, and you may be punished for not following their immoral demands; other cartoon violence like stink-bombs; using the Lord's name in vain in Italian

As for upgrades, there is less here than other store simulators, but they feel more direct and intentional. For example, you can get a few new tables in your store, but you can't expand the size of the store. You can get upgraded kitchen tools like better mixers or a bigger fridge, but you can't increase the number of dry goods shelves or work stations in the kitchen.

Throwing a proverbial wrench in the works is that you have both a rival pizza shop trying to actively sabotage your shop and the "culinary mafia" (according to the Steam page) asking immoral things of you for protection. You may need to rush to the front of your store to remove an advertisement for the rival shop left at your door, or add a laxative to a specific customer's pizza so they'll spend the day in the bathroom instead of getting to some important meeting. (I have not yet found out what the results for refusing to do these tasks is.)

As mentioned at the top of the review, the graphics for Pizza Slice are stylized in a very pleasing way. The world looks a little cartoony and simple, but in a way that matches the light-hearted themes of the game. Further, I will take cartoony-but-cohesive over the arm-clipping, dead-eyed nightmare fuel of the last two simulator games I played, by a long shot. The music is similarly pleasant. It's all very Italian-themed and plays from a jukebox in the front of the shop. It's quiet enough to not be intrusive or annoying, but catchy when you do hear it.

The elephant in the room with Pizza Slice is the bugs. If you look on Steam, the reviews for this game are anywhere from "Mixed" to "Mostly Negative". This is because it suffers from some major bugs. However, before I get into them, I need to say that the game was patched during my time with it, and the patch notes claimed to fix many of the bugs I experienced, so much so that I actually scrubbed my save and restarted. Unfortunately, this patch didn't completely clean the experience, and I still had some issues.

Pre-patch, I experienced a serious bug where, after starting day 2, I saved and returned to the main screen to look into the co-op gameplay. When I returned to the campaign, I got the achievement "Complete the Campaign". After this, no further story elements happened, and for the next two in-game days, the grocery store didn't sell any of the ingredients necessary for making dough. I eventually reached the point where I was going bankrupt. I restarted the entire campaign, thinking maybe I missed something, and suddenly the campaign proceeded with new things happening each day. Then there were slightly less severe bugs, like customers refusing to pay unless the pizza they ate was at least 4/5 stars in quality. I also had a bug where a fresh-opened can of tomato sauce appeared empty until I clicked on it, and one where Alfonso was speaking but Tonio's portrait was shown.

The major patch previously mentioned claimed to be aimed mainly at corrupt save files. The updates say that saves will now allow you to save at any point in the day, not just from the top of the day. This is true, but it isn't 100% flawless. Firstly, if you save and quit out after a customer leaves the table but before you bus it, when you come back to the game, the dirty plate will still be there, but the money will not be. Loading in a save file also seems to overwrite the autosave, something I found out the hard way when leaving on Day 2 without saving to test out my Day 1 saves.

The save files still get corrupted in other ways. I saved after receiving the "poison customer" quest from the Mafia so that I could test out what happens if I follow their directions vs. what happens if I don't. When I reloaded the save file, the quest was gone, but the next day, the mafioso still came by to tell me I had failed his mission. The save file issues also produce a useful exploit where putting a partially-used can of sauce in the fridge overnight will cause it to be full again the next day.

Then there were just other random bugs. Day 10 has one where, if you leave via the front door to do the quest objective, the game will not let you move forward when you return to the restaurant. You have to leave via the side door, then open the front door only when you return. Then there's the possibility of having the health inspector at your restaurant, and while he's there, have the rival pizza shop leave a stink bomb just as he is finishing up, so that you fail the inspection through no way you could foresee. The Q button (back in almost every context) randomly stopped working around Day 11. Prices for items may raise fourfold and get stuck there for days unless you exit the game and load back in.

Score Breakdown:
Higher is better
(10/10 is perfect)

Game Score - 64%
Gameplay - 14/20
Graphics - 7/10
Sound - 7/10
Stability - 1/5
Controls - 3/5

Morality Score - 89%
Violence - 7.5/10
Language - 8/10
Sexual Content - 10/10
Occult/Supernatural - 10/10
Cultural/Moral/Ethical - 6.5/10

There are also some issues with bad conveyance. I already mentioned that the game doesn't tell you about the necessary "percentage of sauce on pizza", so I was delivering 4-star pizzas to every customer for multiple days until I figured it out. Then, if you don't have any open, clean tables, the next customer will say "No table" for their order. I thought that meant he didn't want to sit to eat, that he'd take his pizza home and I tried to figure out how to box the pizza up for him, when it meant I just needed to bus a table.

Another issue is with drink machines. Customer orders immediately started coming in for pizza with a drink once I bought drink machines for the restaurant, but I couldn't find any way to actually give them a drink: no cups, no tutorial, X's over the controls when you try to interact with the drink machine, no extra payment from the customers when they were served, but then also no complaints from the customer for not getting their drink and also an achievement for serving my first drink. I finally discovered disposable cups available for purchase in the ingredients store, but any kind of pop-up telling you where to find them would have been nice.

There are also a bunch of control-related problems, specifically regarding crates. See, all ingredients are stored in crates. If the crate is on an upper shelf, you can't click on the items inside of it. You end up spending time shuffling crates around on shelves or in the fridge just to get items out. This is particularly frustrating with small items like packs of yeast; I had to stick the yeast crate on the lowest shelf just to be able to access the packs near the front of the crate. This is something that could so easily be solved, too, by just having different buttons mapped to "Take item from crate", "Put item into crate", and "Pick up crate" as opposed to the controls being based on whether you are looking directly at an item inside the create or at an empty spot inside the crate.

You also can't store items in the fridge unless they're in a toppings container or a properly-labelled crate. If you have leftover pizza sauce, you have to put the sauce back in the crate, then store the whole crate in the fridge, or else it will spoil. You can also store extra dough in the fridge, but the only way to get a dough crate is to buy at least a single pre-made dough from the grocer. If you finish the day and have leftover dough and no dough crate, all your leftovers have to be thrown out.

As a final issue with the game's overall stability, one of the last updates added multiplayer features, but I am not sure whether or not they work. I couldn't Quick Play with anyone, as I was the only person in the lobby for roughly 15 minutes before giving up, and I didn't have anyone else to try to play a private match with. Whether the issue with queuing with randos is a bug or just a consequence of there not being enough players to find another to play with, I couldn't say.

As for moral considerations, there are a few. Tonio does take the Lord's name in vain once (albeit in Italian). The major things to look out for center around the "culinary" mafia and the rival pizza shop. The former may ask you to do things like add enough rat poison to a customer's food to make them need to spend hours in the bathroom, and the latter may sabotage your store by throwing stink bombs. Stink bombs are often not harmful, but considering rat poison in high enough doses can easily kill a person, this is something I'd be at least wary of showing to particularly young or impressionable minds. At the moment, there don't appear to be any penalties for refusing to do the mafia's bidding.

I will say that the developers do still seem to be working on Pizza Slice; there have been two updates just in the past month, which included bug fixes along with the addition of the co-op mode. It's just such a shame that a simulator game that is such a stand-out in terms of its cohesive identity suffers from bugs that are bad enough to make it impossible to recommend at the time being, like an amazing pizza with a fantastic crust and zesty sauce being topped with pineapple. (Don't hate me, I actually love Hawaiian pizza.) That being said, if the bugs do get ironed out, and you like cooking and store management simulators, Pizza Slice would be a solid recipe for a good time.

- maestro_dana