Godlike Burger Review: Serving Up Customers (PC)

Godlike Burger is a cooking and restaurant management game where you are the nameless owner of your grandmother’s once famous burger restaurant. You are managing the restaurant by yourself, serving customers but also turning some of them into your food source.

Learning how to play is the biggest challenge, because losing resets your progress and makes you start from the beginning. Different planets also change up the tactics you need to use to make money, giving you hours of gameplay to master. However, the game’s controls can be inconvenient, and the user interface can sometimes work against you, causing unforced errors.

Despite those shortcomings, Godlike Burger is an enjoyable simulation experience that will have you glued to your screen as you learn the inner workings of the game. Godlike Burger is currently available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One for $19.99 USD.

Story – The Family Business

The story of Godlike Burger begins with the nameless owner reflecting on his life. Having encountered great adversity after childhood, he reflects on a childhood memory with his grandmother making burgers. His grandmother used to run a popular burger place in the galaxy, but she passed away, leaving the venue abandoned.

With nothing going right in his life, the owner decides to revive the restaurant. Unfortunately, his lack of experience causes dissatisfaction during the first day. This angers a particular customer who is unexpectedly powerful. The nameless owner is threatened with doing a better job, and the game begins from there.

You will travel to different planets to sell your burgers.

It’s not a unique story, with similarities to other simulation games such as Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town or Cat Cafe Manager. You will spend your time building your restaurant’s reputation, traveling to different planets and serving burgers.

Whenever you travel to new planets or encounter a new situation, you will always be greeted with the same 2D comic style storytelling. There are hardly any words in the panels (if any), but you get a sense of the setting and situation from the drawings.

Gameplay – Intense Restaurant Management

Godlike Burger has gameplay similar to Overcooked 2, where you will be running around a kitchen preparing burger recipes. But it’s not just limited to the kitchen, you will be running around the entire restaurant and its parking lot to manage your customers.

Ingredients – The Most Dangerous Game

Your burger restaurant has limited amounts of food. While you are able to purchase burger toppings and buns, the patty must come from other alien races. Fortunately, many alien races will come into your restaurant and can become your burger meats.

Not the cleanest cut, but it gets you the meat you need.

You will walk a precarious line, serving food to your customers while also making plans to turn them into burger meat. If you hesitate too often, you will run out of food and won’t make any money. On the other hand, too much aggression will alert the customers. They will either run away from you to inform the police, or fight back to survive.

At first, you will have to get your hands dirty and kill your customers out of sight. As you earn more money, you can create traps around your restaurant that will kill customers without giving you away. You can also upgrade these traps to increase their damage, equip them with motion sensors and automatically teleport bodies away.

Customers – The Foundation of Business

You can’t forget about the other half of the business, which is serving customers. You have bills to pay and there are consequences if you fall behind. With the ingredients you have, you must make burgers that satisfy your customers or face the consequences.

Each planet has certain alien races living on it, each with their own food preferences and behaviors. Adapting to these preferences and getting their order right will give you tips along with higher ratings. Failing to adapt will upset customers and hurt your restaurant rating.

A customer’s order gives you money to support the restaurant.

While it can be nice to stay on a familiar planet, your earning potential is greater on new planets. Switching planets can also help you dodge police activity if they are starting to catch on. The downside is that different planets will have a new set of challenges to adapt to. You will need to experiment or you will meet your end on a planet.

The challenge of managing your daily income while making time to acquire your ingredients is a fun combination. It will be difficult to accomplish in the beginning, but Godlike Burger knows you won’t get it right the first time. Failure is an integral part of your success, and there will be a lot of it.

Upgrades – The Rewards of Failure

Godlike Burger is similar to games such as Dead Cells where dying means starting over from the beginning. All the planets you unlocked, your ingredient inventory and money will disappear when you die. Objectives for unlocking new planets will also change, preventing you from repeating the same actions.

Dying can happen for a number of reasons. Customers may catch on to you hunting them too often and fight back. The police attacked you because they found you in a search. You didn’t pay your bills and debt collectors are showing up to collect their due. You can even die in a natural disaster like a meteor shower.

Trap upgrades never disappear, letting you hunt customers in every playthrough.

It is frustrating to die, but it isn’t a complete loss. Your early game struggles emphasize buying upgrades over paying off your debts. Upgrades will never disappear even when you die, letting you keep your traps, kitchen improvements and stat boosts. Each subsequent playthrough will be easier than the last, as you learn from your mistakes.

As you get better, you will be able to manage your money and plan for the future. You will be able to work towards unlocking more planets, learning how to complete objectives without losing too much money.

You will have to learn about a planet’s unique circumstances when you move, repeating the learning process. Fortunately, it feels like a new challenge to overcome instead of a full reset. Part of the game’s appeal lies finding the right way to approach a planet to make money and achieve objectives.

Controls – The Wrong Command

What holds Godlike Burger back are the controls and user interface quirks. While learning the commands isn’t too difficult, the buttons you need to press aren’t always convenient to reach. Your early deaths will often come when you accidentally attack a customer, or the game believes you are in front of a different object.

A big part of the game is opening the fridge and taking out materials, but even that can be difficult. The commands for taking out food require semi-awkward finger placement on a keyboard, and making a mistake often means restarting from the beginning.

Accidentally kicking a customer can set off a chain of bad events.

Button placement can also be awkward for a controller as well, and it will take time to adapt. Movement will always be done through thumbsticks and not the directional pad. While great for general movement, it can be tough for individual item selection when the pressure is on.

The user interface can also work against you, especially when orders are changing. Orders are done like tickets at a restaurant, except the tickets stay on the board. This often means you have to view completed orders along with incomplete ones, wasting precious time. Orders change positions when customers are served/get killed, which leads to incorrect servings because an order shifted just before you selected it.

Item management is another area where the game falls short. You can hold a large number of burger patties at a time, but you can’t hold more than one set of burger buns at a time. Burger toppings work similarly to burger patties, which makes it odd that only bread has that limitation.

Serving a wrong order is easier than wasting time redoing it.

You can add one topping at a time, but making a mistake means redoing everything. This can be frustrating if all you need to do is reverse the last mistake. It is harder when you take the food from the fridge, as you might have to throw food on the floor just to isolate your mistake.

While it isn’t enough to severely hamper the experience, the issues are prominent enough that they do hold the game back from being amazing.

Audio & Visuals – Perfectly Normal Operations

The visual style switches between the 2D comic book illustrations and 3D graphics. The 2D illustrations don’t have any words, which allows the expressions of characters to tell the story. There is a lot of expression even in short scenes, and that level of expression is all you need to understand.

No words, but you understand what is happening in the comic.

The 3D graphics are fun and somewhat cutesy. The food ingredients look normal, and the alien races don’t look intimidating. The reactions of the aliens are always fun to look at, whether they put up a fight or run away in sheer terror.

The soundtrack that plays in the background of the restaurant operations is jovial and upbeat. It is the type of music you would expect in a family diner/restaurant which adds to the atmosphere. The music provides a great contrast between regular business operations and hunting customers for meat.

As if to imply that there is nothing wrong, the music never changes even when you harm customers. You can change the ambient music through the radio opposite the fridge, but it’s always music that is easy on the ears.

This review for Godlike Burger was played on Steam with a key provided by Liquid Pug.