Earlier this year, I played and reviewed the rather macabre cooking-business game Ravenous Devils. A Sweeny Todd-inspired, kill people, cook them and serve them to customers type of game. Now, I’m reviewing Godlike Burger from developer Liquid Pug and publisher Daedalic Entertainment. Guess what? Yup, it’s another game about killing and cooking your customers. Only with a less-human angle.
“Godlike Burger puts you in the shoes of a maniac chef who makes the best burgers in the universe. The secret ingredient? The customers themselves! Run the restaurant, cook delicious burgers and kill lots of aliens. But be careful – leave no witnesses uncooked!”
Set in space, you run a burger joint where you serve tasty burgers to customers, before killing the very same customers to use them as the main ingredient to your tasty burgers, to sell to more customers. And the cycle repeats. Think something like Overcooked, but with a big emphasis on murder. You wait for a customer to come into your restaurant and order some food. Grab the indigents from the fridge, cook them up and then construct the burger to the customer’s requirements. Do they want cheese, tomato, etc?
However, you’ll need to dispatch your customers in order to keep your food supplies stocked. Now, killing folk in front of your customers would be a bad idea. Customers can and will fight back, or run away and call the police. If the police get involved, that’s a bad thing. You can travel to different planets to sell your burgers and each planet has a different race of aliens with different requirements. Moving to a new planet can also help you dodge those police if things get a bit too heated.
Throw in a load of upgrades for your restaurant’s kitchen, the ability to build traps to kill your customers and so on. There’s even a bit of a rogue-lite element as if you lose, you’ll have to start from the beginning of the game. However, you’ll keep any unlocked upgrades and (hopefully) learn something from your last run. Really, there are two sides to the business to manage here, the making and serving of the burgers and the secretly killing of the customers while trying to stay one step ahead of the police.
Available now for PC and all the consoles, with an £18 price tag. Personally, I felt that Godlike Burger was a bit too ‘busy’ for a game of its type. Plus, I was playing this on the Xbox with a controller and everything just felt really awkward. I’m sure this plays far better on a PC with mouse controls. There is just too much to keep your eye on and the UI is way too small, something that is often an issue when porting a game from PC to consoles. This makes reading what the customer wants pretty difficult at times, leading to mistakes that aren’t really your fault. You can only hold one burger bun at a time, so when you are preparing multiple orders, it really slows the pace down. Bearing in mind that you are always against the clock here too. This single burger bun thing is particularly strange because you can hold multiples of every other ingredient.
Overall, Godlike Burger is a great idea but with some poor design choices that hamper your enjoyment. Awkward controls, an unfriendly UI and it all just feels way too fiddly. Still, outside of those niggles, there is a good game here, it just needed a little bit of streamlining and some of the creases ironing out.
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