I started playing Burger Shop as a trial on Big Fish Games, and got so addicted to it I had to buy it. It costs around £3 from Big Fish Games, and it really is a game that exceeds the amount you pay for it. If you were to class the game into a category, I would say that it is basically a time management game, similar to ones where you have to keep charactrers happy and earn a particular amount of money.The game starts off as you as a man who finds a burger shop blueprint and you decide to use it to make your own restaurant.
Throughout the game, you visit many different locations, whether it be the circus, a football game or an alien spaceship. There is about 10 different locations, each with 10 different levels included within them. As the levels progress it gets much harder, I had to replay many of these levels several times before I ever managed to get the Expert rating. However, it's such a great game I didn't really mind this fact!
The game is mostly done through creating different foods, filling up drink and fries containers or making ice creams. However, as the levels progress, it gets even harder as you are faced with different levels of characters such as the clowns who will want things off the menu, girls in packs of three who want three of the same items and punks who have a slow patience waiting.
First, you can complete the Story Mode, which is the basis of the entire game, and is just the normal game where you can learn how to play and about all the parts of it. Playing this was a great way of learning the ropes to the game, and it took me a couple of weeks to complete it with the full Expert ratings, making it exceed the cheap price I had paid for it. There is 80 levels in total for Story Mode, and the longer ones took around 5 minutes each to finish which shows how challenging they get.
After completing Story Mode, it unlocks the Expert Story, which is basically the Story Mode but with harder levels and difficult customers to please.Similar to Story Mode, this also has 80 levels, and while they are in the same location, they've changed it quite a bit so that all the characters are available to order food and the items get more complex from the beginning. This took me another 3 weeks to complete, so it really is a game that has a lot of gameplay within it.
The other two modes are Challenge and Relax Mode, which are unlocked after playing a few levels of Story Mode. In Challenge Mode, you have to play from the first location to unlock all the later ones while getting a particular score. The main aim of Challenge is to play within 1 minute bursts where each burst gets harder and harder and you have to see how many points you can get before it just gets impossible. However, Relax mode is completely different, as all the characters hearts reduce at a slower level, and you pretty much just play through particular levels, trying to get a higher score than your previous.
These are for casual gameplay mostly, and I generally tend to play them if I'm feeling a bit lazy or while I'm taking a break from working on documents. They're great for just relaxing and reducing stress, and can be played pretty mindlessly. These forms of gameplay also include trophies for when you beat your high scores, so they never really get boring and you are always trying to beat your high score.
Trophies are rewarded throughout the game for doing things like getting every level with expert, serving a large amount of customers or serving a large amount of food. This gives you something to acheive, so even if you finish all the Story and Expert modes, you will actually want to keep playing. There is 72 trophies overall, and they vary between the Story, Challenge and Relaxed modes and have you doing things such as reaching 500,000 on Story Mode, serving 2000 customers and serving Clowns 100 milkshakes.
The graphics are much better than I expected them to be, and out of all the time management games that I play, I would have to say that so far Burger Shop has some of the best so far. They are relatively crisp and well designed with the characters having nice animations and looks. The sound however, may get on some peoples nerves, as they may find it to be annoying or repetitive, as after playing for a while I had to change to my own music in the background.
