Developer: Liquid Pug
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Platform: PC, Switch, Xbox One, PS4, Linux, Mac
Tested on: PC
Godlike Burger – Review
What if, hear us out, you would make Overcooked, but with Sweeney Todd running the restaurant? That must have been the pitch for Godlike Burger, a game created by Liquid Pug. In this game, you try to serve your customers the best burgers you can, however, you don’t have much in stock when it comes to the meat for your patties. This is where the customers come in because they taste.. ehm, are always right..
Story
In Godlike Burger, the hairy protagonist (you) is a failure at everything he ever tried in life. Born to screw up, he was loved by no one but his gran. Gran always made the best burgers ever and even had her own restaurant in space. Our nameless guy decides to take over the restaurant after Gran dies from a heart attack, but he sucks at making burgers. Upon opening the restaurant and disappointing many customers, he is visited by a deity of sorts, who murders all those present and gives our guy the choice between making burgers or death. Choosing to make burgers, our guy is stuck with a load of bills, an empty fridge, and alien corpses left by the mysterious deity. One plus one equals meat patties made from alien flesh, and this is how his life as a customer-butchering burger chef starts. At the start, events are introduced by short comics, but the game’s story progresses rather slowly as you first need to earn money and buy upgrades before you really make progress.
Graphics
The cutscenes are like comic books, and the in-game segments flawlessly adapt these graphics to a 3D environment with a nicely animated restaurant and alien visitors. The chef looks great too, and the only downside we found to the graphics is that what you see is what you get. Aside from some unlockable skins for your chef that you earn by just playing, the game will stay the same. The restaurant will look the same, even though you travel to different planets, and the objects you interact with don’t change visually. The game could have used a bit more variety here and there.
Sound
The music in Godlike Burger is kind of alright and you can even change the tunes by using a radio at your service bar. Sadly, the background music gets repetitive after a while. The tunes aren’t like full songs, but more like elevator music filling up the empty void. The sound effects, however, are spot on and work really well in the game. These effects include footsteps, alien voice gurgles, the odd broken toilet, or a trap springing (and thus slaughtering your visitors). These sounds are simply timed with perfection and they sound original, which is certainly a plus.
Gameplay
Godlike Burger is a hectic arcade-like restaurant simulator, filled with action and fast decision-making. Each new day, the game has a preparation phase where you spend money to buy ingredients and upgrades, like in an evil mastermind’s lair. After that, it has a gameplay phase where you will need to successfully finish a day of running a restaurant. Customers will walk into your restaurant and each has their own set of likes, dislikes, activities, and stuff they are immune to depending on what race they are. The only way to create full burgers is by killing off these different races for their meat and feeding them to others. While you start off with only rats (who prefer to eat their brethren), the number of different races quickly increases, which is an issue if you don’t know how to handle them. As an example: one is strong and beefy and hard to knock down, and the other is immune to your cleaver which is your most basic weapon to kill somebody. This forces you to only kill certain customers at certain locations or times, making the game more challenging.
As you earn money and complete quests, you can then continue to other planets which have different inhabitants or rulesets. The rulesets cause random events such as breaking toilets, burglars trying to steal your food, or protestors mixing up what can already be a hard day. You can engage in a fight and buy/activate traps to kill the inhabitants, but they can also fight back if you don’t instantly kill them. Every time you get hit, you lose a life. Lose all lives and you have to start the game from scratch (lose all planet progress and money in your pocket) aside from the upgrades you already unlocked. This feels a bit unnecessary and it drags the game out quite a lot as it can already take a while to get to the most rewarding planets. It’s also a shame there is no multiplayer mode available as of now, as the game seems perfect to play with a buddy.
All these rules and variations make Godlike Burger somewhat of a chaotic puzzler in a way, as you need to be at the right place at the right time to properly kill tougher targets without other people seeing you do this. It’s a lovely bag of chaos that we thoroughly enjoyed, although it was also sometimes a slow process that made us somewhat frightened to go to the next planet. After all, one big mistake with tougher inhabitants and we could lose all our progress. There are some good upgrades available to counter such handicaps, but you still simply need to play a lot to buy them all.
Conclusion
Godlike Burger is a fun and challenging game with its own crazy universe. You need to try your best to manage a full day of chaos and do some micromanaging to avoid getting caught killing or making the game harder for yourself. Aside from some unnecessary setbacks in the game progression, it’s a well-crafted product where we only miss a multiplayer option to make it better. This game could take days of your life without hesitation and as easily as you take the lives of customers to make meat patties in-game.
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