Mob Science is taking its shot at sim-like games with its most recent title, Coffee Bar. A new entry to the business management genre, Coffee Bar  has been growing quickly. It made our fastest-growing Facebook apps list this week with around 155,000 monthly active users and 45,000 daily active users — all earned in the past 7 days.

However, we found that while Coffee Bar is technically sound, the game feels almost identical to similar games in the past.

The concept behind Coffee Bar is perhaps the only noticeable difference between it and other cafe/restaurant games that came before it: players try to make a popular coffee bar. You buy and place coffee makers, then choose from a variety of coffee shop menu items to make (black coffee, lattes, hot chocolate, etc.). When a menu item is ordered, you click a couple times to “add” ingredients and, after a set amount of time, the brew is ready.

You then place the drink on a serving bar and your waiters or waitresses serve it to customers until the stock runs out. The higher level the drink, the longer it takes to make, but the more the profit you earn.

The happiness or unhappiness of your patrons will affect the rating of your coffee bar. When your rating is higher, more customers walk in. Of course, it’s also possible to upset customers. If no drinks are prepared or there are not enough staff to serve, the non-player customers get angry and leave, lowering the bar’s ratings.

The social aspects of the game are familiar too. You can hire friends as waiters. The game gives you two temp workers initially, but as your bar gets larger and more successful, more will be needed. The number of workers is gated by level, and any workers beyond the two temp employees will require a friend to play — unlike Restaurant City where any Facebook friend can work for you, whether they play or not.

You can also visit friends’ bars and leave messages via a cell phone icon, which in this beta version, does not appear to work. But, other than gifting purchased decorative items or servings of food and drink, there are no benefits from social play.

Coffee Bar also offers a more in-depth feature, allowing you to dress your avatar and decorate the bar in very modern styles. But again, this is exactly what we’ve come to expect from games in this genre.

In the end, there’s nothing unique about Coffee. Other management games that we’ve reviewed have also copied mechanics and features, but the developers typically also make an attempt to add new, if minor, concepts into the mix. In Coffee Bar, there are no original mechanics or concepts. There’s even a daily quiz for money that is copied from Restaurant City.

Of course, it’s hardly unheard of for a Facebook developer to closely follow past games. As 2010 as progressed, many developers have said that being unique or unusual counts for something — that the day of fast follows and copies is coming to a close. But players also have to recognize and care about cloned mechanics. In this case, it looks like the new theme may be enough to carry a game that is otherwise no different than a dozen others that came before it, taking every core element from the top titles.