Godlike Burger Review – Dubious Ingredients

I’ll start this GodLike Burger Review review by confessing that I grew up in the days when flash games were at their peak, when websites like Facebook, Miniclip, and Y8 games hosted an enormous library of titles that catered to each genre. But the ones that really clicked with me were cooking sims.

A huge chunk of my time was spent toiling away for hours in games like Cafeland, running my virtual restaurant. I did not care if I was eating my own lunch on time, but I did make sure that each customer at my virtual cafe was served their desired order timely. And although I was hilariously bad at cooking in real-life, in-game I was a five-star chef.

As such, I have a strong affinity for cooking sims and so when Godlike Burger was released, it was only natural that I gave it a shot. Another reason for my being attracted to specifically this game was that it comes with a dark twist; a twist that would’ve haunted me 10 years ago. Let’s analyze it together in our GodLike Burger Review!

Story And Setting

Godlike Burger is a cooking sim where players manage their own restaurant in outer space. It features no solid plot or story for the player to follow, however, there are a few comic-book-style cutscenes at the start of the game which serve to set up the premises of the game. These cutscenes provide some backstory into the owner of the restaurant, who is also the protagonist.

The opening moments paint the image of a broken and beaten-down man who cannot find his place anywhere in the world. He has no prospects in life, until one day he decides to reopen his grandmother’s burger restaurant in order to continue her legacy. But things don’t really go as planned, and an unfortunate situation takes a turn for the worse as he is forced to choose between cooking burgers or death. And now he also faces another dilemma, as his debts and expenses pile up and he has no way to sustain the business and himself. So he decides to do the only ration thing that he can; turn his own customers into burger meat.

This twist, although dark, was commendable as it was a new take on a genre. Cooking sims usually target a specific niche but I am pretty sure people out of this domain will try the game at least once just out of pure curiosity.

Gameplay

Let’s dive into the gameplay section of our Godlike Burger Review. The core gameplay loop follows a lot of the same patterns as any other cooking game of this sort. Customers come into your restaurant and then you take their orders and serve them food with the requested ingredients. Now, this is where the game deviates a bit. since you can gain three things from customers: prestige, money, or MEAT! 

Money is chiefly used to pay bills, buy upgrades, order sauces or ingredients (except meat), or bribe the police. Don’t like paying bills? Well then get ready to greet the debt collectors who will visit your shop regularly, only they’ll be here to make mince meat out of you.

At the start of the game, you only have access to basic kitchen equipment which breaks down quite easily. But as you earn more money by serving customers, you can buy different upgrades for your kitchens such as extra stoves or liquid soap which increases dishwashing speed. These can speed up an order and also make micromanagement easier.

You can also buy upgrades for your own character which include health, stamina, and offensive capabilities upgrades, but at the end of the day, there are only so many aliens you can kill by engaging them head-on. Luckily the game features a number of variants of traps that allow you to take down multiple targets at once. Initially, you only have access to a single trap which is quite limited in capabilities, but you can buy more powerful variants that have short cooldown times and can even automatically dispose of corpses.

In order to fulfill orders, you need different ingredients like buns, tomatoes, etc. which can only be bought as ingredients and you’ll need to spend some cash to order them at the end of the day. Sauces can serve different purposes ranging from instantly killing a customer to forcing a customer to use the lavatory, thus isolating them.

But even the slickest of ruffians make rookie mistakes sometimes. If the police find something suspicious, you should always have some money at your disposal to bribe them, and if you don’t, you’ll need to leave for another planet until things cool down. Also, don’t forget to put your hard-earned cash in a safe, otherwise, you’ll lose it when you die.

If you are kind enough to let customers eat their food and leave alive, you’ll gain Prestige. As you gain more prestige, more alien species will show up at your door demanding different types of burgers with rarer ingredients. Keeping these ingredients in stock can be costly, but these customers pay much more than your average Joe.

You can buy every ingredient in the game with money except meat, as that can only be obtained by hacking a customer to death. There are two main ways to pull off these killings, as you can either engage in direct combat with them or lay down traps in areas they might wander into. Traps allow you to get your secret ingredient without getting your own hands dirty, and are the preferred method.

Now, the gameplay does have some shortcomings, which we will go over briefly. Each planet can be unlocked by completing a set of challenges, and while some of these are relatively straightforward and simple, others can be downright unforgiving. These are also random, and sometimes you get even be given challenges for which you haven’t even unlocked the required components yet.

Another major issue with the game is the death mechanic. When you die you only get to keep your upgrades and the money you put in the safe, but you lose all the planets that you spent hours to unlock, restarting the grind. Although the upgrades make the grind easier, you’ll still have wasted your time and will need to unlock every planet again. Dying is also pretty easy in the first few hours of the game, so get ready to restart over and over on the same planet multiple times.

I understand what the title is going for here, but such a mechanic simply doesn’t work in a cooking and restaurant management game.

Visuals And Performance

The game ticks a number of boxes in the visuals department. Artistically it tries to target the retro space aesthetic of the 90s and it does a pretty good job at that. The whole space setting is really charming, your alien customers are freaky and diverse, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about how much I missed Futurama the whole time I was playing. 

But again, the developers have also tried to make the atmosphere of the cafe bleaker due to the twisted source of your meat. And maybe that’s why the palette is a bit muted and lacking any sort of vibrant colors, but I am obviously assuming a lot of things. I genuinely think that the entire premise is great and so are a lot of the designs, but visually the game is lacking.

The game does shine in the performance department though, as I did not face any major crashes or other hiccups. The game isn’t that demanding either and can easily run on low-end PCs.

Verdict

Godlike Burger has all the features of a good cooking building sim, with the added twist of butchering customers to feed more customers. The micromanagement that accompanies each task, such as unlocking upgrades, buying ingredients, and upgrading traps, can be tiresome at first but become really rewarding as you progress further through the game. The added choice of killing the customer to gain meat, or letting them go to gain prestige adds a new level of depth to a title of this genre. The artistic representation really stuck with me too!

However, it is held back by some questionably cumbersome challenges, and the added grind which accompanies a player’s death to overcome all their lost progress halts the flow of the game. Heck, many players might give up in just the first few hours because of this. But still, I would recommend this game to people, as it easily satiates the itch for cooking sims.

This has been our Godlike Burger Review. While you’re here, consider checking out some of our other articles.

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