Action Puzzle Review

BurgerTime Party – Review

Equip your forks and your knives and be prepared for the 5-Star meal that is BurgerTime Party! for the Nintendo Switch, developed by G-Mode with XSEED/Marvellous Games as the publisher! This is an action/puzzle game for the Nintendo Switch.

I will start by saying that before this review, I didn’t know there was an original Burger Time released in 1982 by Japanese company Data East for the arcades, so I went to this game blind with what the series is about. I can say I had a great surprise with it!

The game’s recipe focuses on Peter Pepper, a chef who must create hamburgers for his restaurant while using pepper spray to stun and dodge a number of ingredients who somehow obtained life. These include Mr. Hot Dog, Mister Egg, and Mister Pickle. I don’t think I need to explain which ingredient is which.

The first five levels in the single-player just introduce you to the ingredients given life and how they behave. The rest of the solo stages are quite fun and to me, it was the part I had to focus more on to play. Don’t worry about not buying this game because you don’t regularly have friends around to play, as it’s great fun even without other players.

I do want to add that I would love more story on this since it’s understandable why the food want Peter dead since he does eat their family and friends but how did they come to life? And why the hell is Peter so small compared to the burgers? Which type of illness does Peter have to die from a single touch of a pickle? Does he have a ton of allergies? If that’s the case, then he is really screwed in the kitchen as he is constantly touching them to make burgers. Trying to wrap my head around it is far more difficult than making a burger in real life. There’s definitely some suspension of disbelief required, even beyond the normal amount to play a game with living vegetables.

After the solo section is when the party starts: The multiplayer. Although I must say the stages are a bit small for multiplayer since they don’t scale up a ton from the single-player and it ends up going significantly faster. It still is incredibly fun and it tries to impose some additional challenge to compensate for the number of chefs by making you share lives, though you can revive other chefs if you are fast enough.

I played the co-op multiplayer with two very different groups of people: Some friends of mine and my 6,8 and 4-year-old cousins on Christmas and I can say both of them had fun in very different ways: My group of friends wanted to see how fast we could get the maximum points and also see who could score the most points for bragging rights. You do win as a team but the game keeps tabs on who scored the most. My younger cousins wanted to just finish the game and see the pretty food enemies (fortunately we already had lunch or else I would have to feed all of them). I can see how this game can appeal to a large scale of people despite the lower difficulty in multiplayer and the small stages. This is a good one to grab some friends, order some food then create more food while running away from it!

There are also two other modes: the first one is the battle mode. In this mode, you can divide people into either chef or food in any sort of way you prefer. Want to pick on someone who spilled water on your sofa? Then put him as the single chef and have 3 of you player as food and watch the suffering. There are, however, some issues I found with this mode. The game balance is very much in favor of the food players, due to every one of them receiving the ‘Mr Donut’ dash’ that cancels the pepper spray. On the opposite side, the pepper spray only needs to touch the chef once in the case of 1V1 for the win. As another minor complaint, or rather a wish is that I would love it if the battle mode could be played with only one player and the game’s AI as the food. The maps are fun and they have buffs for both like movement speed and etc, so it would be a nice extra mode.

Last but not least, for those of you who have played the original burger time, challenge mode exists! It’s basically the same game style as the original game, but with an online scoreboard (that I won’t reveal my score on since I suck on hard mode). There are also easy and normal modes, so you can feel less threatened by the competitive nature of online or just so you can just chill out and enjoy some classic burger time gameplay.

As for the audiovisual aspect, firstly I want to say that I do enjoy the visuals as they feel like a cartoon I would watch as a kid. That said, they are so simple that they could be from a flash game from the start of the century. I do think that they match with the gameplay though. The music isn’t anything to praise but there’s nothing wrong with it too, it’s just simple and doesn’t add much to the game aside from small touches like the theme that plays when you finish the level that adds to the overall aesthetic of the game itself.

Overall, I would recommend this game for anyone looking for a party game with the family or friends to see who is the quickest on their feet (or chef shoes) and for those who played the first one as this game feels like a certain improvement over it. The gameplay is fun even in short sessions, the multiplayer has its flaws since more effort could be put to make sure it felt more appropriate but it’s still super engaging to play and the challenge mode adds a flavor to the simple mechanics the game offers. With all of this mixed in a bowl and stirred correctly in your Switch, bon appétit!

The game can be bought physically from online retailers including Amazon (US) and Amazon (UK).

Many thanks to Marvellous Games for providing a review code of the game.

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