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Bustle: to hurry busily or with much fuss.
I've been occupying myself lately playing a new time management/customer service type restaurant game called "Burger Bustle".
SideNote:Bustle? Here's word you don't hear very often -I like it. Say it out loud a few times, it's pretty funny!
A time management game serving hamburgers is not a new concept but the way "Burger Bustle" works is a little bit different from other time management games; giving it a new freshness factor.
You'll be running a diner (naturally), but the goal here isn't to return a struggling restaurant to it's former glory or anything like that: it's just to rack up as high of a score as possible to beat out your fictitious rivals, earning trophies along the way.
In most other time management games, you do almost everything yourself, which works fine because your customers needs are usually simple and about what you'd expect from hungry people coming into a burger joint. For example in a typical restaurant game, you need to seat your customers, take their order, serve the food, take their cash then clean the tables.
The restaurant you'll be managing is pretty typical, where the customers place their orders at the counter. Sometimes their order is pretty simple, maybe just a regular hamburger, but you will quickly get customers who come in placing an order for their whole family, with orders that include 5 different burgers with different toppings, 3 sides, 2 different types of sodas as well as an ice cream dessert!
There's no way a single person will be able to cook up that entire order, hence the importance of your trusty employees! Flo from "Diner Dash" would be so jealous.
At each level, the goals will be to earn a certain amount of cash in a set time. Hiring more employees might make your restaurant more efficient, but paying these guys means that you will take longer to reach your cash goals. Balancing this requires good planning and strategy.
As if that wasn't challenging enough, each game level has a different set of tasks you'll need to complete as well,such as serving a certain number of customers, preparing a set number of burgers, and earning a specific amount of money.
As the game progresses, levels get more and more difficult to pass; with upgraded fancy burgers being and less employees being available.
Good help is hard to find these days!
Speaking of your trusty employees; you will need to micro-manage your employees who are essentially doing all the work, deciding the types of burgers and condiments that you want your burger dive to offer, as well as what extras such as drinks and fries you want to sell.
You'll need to physically move employees around to the different stations to make sure that all of the work gets done. It took me a little bit of time to remember to move my staff around, but once I got that down, I was in good shape.
"Burger Bustle" is a juggling act - micro managing and focusing on level goals or you will run out of time.
Well, you don’t really run out of time, if you spend too much time, you will not win a trophy for that level, but you will still pass.
But you really should shoot for earning a gold or at the very least a silver cup.
The game is kind of sneaky at times, as it gives you all of these available upgrades on each level and so, but if you don’t pay attention, you will use too much money to upgrade the wrong stations and find yourself taking too long to pass it.
So in other words, most of the time it's just trial and error, and you'll be clueless which machine to buy. Like half way through, you might realize, OK, no one is buying ice cream in this round (umm, I don't know, but it might have something to do with the fact that it is set in Antarctica... just saying!) so your money is wasted.
Speaking of food, the menu items are different from level to level instead of being added one by one permanently. On some levels, you must pay to open counters serving foods needed to achieve the level goal; these counters are draped in covers till you earn enough to open them.
A minor problem I had was that only some customers leave tips; and it's so obscure and far away, you never realize someone just tipped you, and you lose a lot of money. I like games where the customer tips on the counter itself. It's a catch 22 in a way, you can't get the trophies without the level ups, and you can't get the level ups without the trophies! Weird but true.
Each time you pass one of your competitors on the menu list, you'll earn an achievement. These aren't just for decorational purposes (although you can view them on a pretty display shelf in the Bonus Room), but they give a handy little bonuses too, like the Grammaphone that freezes customers moods for a short time. Suhweet!
I liked "Burger Bustle", you know after playing so many RTS games it was refreshing to play it like a supervisor instead of a worker for a change. It really kept my interest level up.
Hustle on over and play "Burger Bustle"!
Get Burger Bustle Here |
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Posted by oxyjen on Jun 29, 2010
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