Casual Games Reviews, News & Talk

Chef Heidi believes in high quality cuisine and wants to take burgers to another level beyond fast food. Since none of the fast food restaurants want her fancy burgers, she starts her own restaurant.

Unlike the other restaurant or run a business games, this one also includes match three for something different. Heidi doesn’t simply take orders, upgrade her menu, give treats to customers to make them happier and pick up cash. She matches ingredients until she has enough for a recipe — for every customer’s order.

The ingredients board also serves up surprises like tokens for buying upgrades, milkshakes for treating a customer and microwaves to quickly add ingredients for a recipe.

For variety, the game progresses through five restaurants. As Heidi’s business grows, so do the goal and expert amounts for the level. She also has a diversity of clientele from the grandmother and the professional to the astronaut and the annoying street mime.

Some may be disappointed because the game only has one kind of play: story. It doesn’t have an arcade version as many of these style games do. The one thing that irritated me was the slow selection of items. I couldn’t click ahead as the game remembered none of the steps. Sometimes I had to click several times before the game recognized my action.

Those quiet mimes aren’t so quiet — it doesn’t take long before they start showing signs of anger by beating themselves on the head. That’s how I felt at times during the game when a customer’s “happiness” was low or I didn’t have enough ingredients on the board to make a match for a needed item. The game offers the right amount of challenge.

In upgrades, you can buy more sweet treats to raise the customer happiness levels, add flavor and speed to the French fry fryer and soda machine, gain more lives, and add more recipes. I liked the fact that the game sold out of sweet treats so I couldn’t buy a ton of them. It would make the game too easy.

The game could use more variety of ingredients. Most sandwiches were either hamburger or chicken with the standard toppings of lettuce, tomatoes, ketchup, and cheese. Every recipe used specific toppings. When the chicken appeared on the game, I hadn’t bought the recipe for a chicken sandwich. So the challenge was working around the chicken and trying to earn enough tokens to buy the chicken recipe.

I only bought 7 of the 12 recipes. The more recipes you have, the more expensive your sandwiches and the higher your sales to help you move to the next level. But I think adding fish, salad, and other items would improve the game’s play.

The interface is crisp as lettuce and the game will give players a rush. Those who enjoy match three and action games will like the unusual combination of the two styles.

System Requirements

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• 700MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM
• DirectX 7.0 or higher