In Beach Life, you manage a holiday resort. You start out with at least a hotel, a construction yard, a complaints office, and a power generator. You have to build restaurants, discos, amusement halls, hire lifeguards, security, cleaning personnel, to keep your guests amused and safe. Some of the attractions appeal more to men, others more to women. It is important that you keep the sexes balanced.
Beach Life comes with twelve maps. They are all supposed to be part of the same archipelago, which accounts for the identical flora. Five of them are part of larger islands, and the guests arrive by bus (a lovely, 50s-style bus, BTW). The others are small islands, and the guests arrive by boat. Each map has its own weather, hazards, and difficulty setting. Easy means guests will hardly ever complain about prizes, but you have only few buildings available. Common hazards are sharks and a poor water supply. For each map there is a mission with clearly defined goals and a time limit. If you succeed, you can continue playing, and the map becomes available in »sandbox mode,« a sort of freeform play.
There are annoyances. One is the odd shape of the buildings, and the way the game handles them. Buildings in Beach Life are rarely ever exactly rectangular, there are always some tiles missing, they are far larger than buildings in similar games (in Emperor, the 5×5 mill was already one of the largest buildings; the restaurant in Beach Life is something like 15×15), and they automatically have one tile of road around them. The road tiles of two neighboring buildings can overlap. This is in itself not a bad idea, but it is very hard to predict if a building will fit into an empty space or not, especially since there is no way to make the game display a grid.
If you have misplaced a house, there is no immediate remedy. You have to build it; then, when it is finished, you can sell it again. Your workers will then dismantle the building, and you will get back part of the original price. Of course, dismantling can be done only during your builders' work hours, so a misplaced building may cost you quite some time.
Once finished, the buildings start to disintegrate ridiculously fast. A mechanics shack should be one of the first things you build. And no matter how many mechanics I hired, I could never get them to inspect the houses properly, I had to check them myself regularily and call a mechanic when needed (having the toilets cleaned is a similar problem). If a building is in poor condition, guests will refuse to use it. If the power generator gets in bad shape (it tends to do so right at the beginning), it will produce less energy.
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