they weren't kidding, this really is a game of pressure. Knowing how unpredictable atari games are though I honestly thought that this could be a game where you do nothing but use a virtual pressure cooker lmao.
The game involves going back and forth between a top and bottom screen where you need to make burgers according to customer demands on the top section and sort out which order goes where on the bottom section. Because our friend Short-Order Sam makes burgers in his proprietary burger dojo, the ingredients in the kitchen are flung at random towards him where he must either pick up the ingredients he needs or parry that shit back to the ingredient box. The burgers chug along a conveyor belt so you gotta be quick on your feet collecting what you need and sorting it out without making any mistakes.
and boy howdy do you NOT need to make any mistakes!! Instead of a life counter you have a "performance score" where if it hits 0 its game over. You start with 50 points and missing an ingredient costs 1 point, mis-sorting a burger or dropping it altogether costs 5 points, and having a burger fall off the conveyor belt costs a whopping 10 points. If you lose your mojo and get in a bad rhythm of burger-making, it's incredibly easy for the burger losses to stack up quickly and end your game before you even know it. I will definitely say that the RNG nature of both the random order of what ingredients get thrown AND the customer demands can sometimes put you in a very difficult or borderline unwinnable scenerio, so sometimes its better to tank a burger loss or two to reset your groove and try to recoup your lost points. Every 10k points you get 10 performance points added to your total, and it's through clearing levels with as many performance points remaining as possible that you will get a really high score. My only real gameplay gripe is that while you CAN parry away any ingredients that you might not need to get rid of them, that's only able to be done if you aren't holding anything. If you accidentally pick up something that no customers are clamoring for, there's no way to get rid of it and it can very easily ruin an entire run as you usually have to sacrifice a whole burger to get rid of it and then by that point the mojo has been ruined and that's that. If you are trying to score high and hit that 45k point threshold to enter the prestigious Short Order Squad, it is imperative that you don't make mistakes, as your score is heavily punished for screwups, and they will build up over time. I was able to hit 49k through a decent run bolstered by good RNG, so it's not an impossibly high goal. My protip is to just always play at the highest difficulty (game 7) as it's only marginally faster than the lower difficulties yet yields way higher point gains. The manual surprisingly doesn't even mention what the difficulties do, but it does for some reason have an entire page dedicated to burger facts. Did you know the first Cheeseburger in America was served in Los Angeles in 1929? You do now!
This is a highkey banger for the system, it has a perfect level of depth, difficulty, and responsiveness to get me going alongside RNG elements that aren't absolute bullshit but just enough to constantly keep me hitting that reset button with that "i can do better next time" energy. Absolutely worth a play, probably one of my new atari favorites thus far. Activision hits it out of the park once again, so far of what I've played these guys have made better games than atari themselves!!
The game involves going back and forth between a top and bottom screen where you need to make burgers according to customer demands on the top section and sort out which order goes where on the bottom section. Because our friend Short-Order Sam makes burgers in his proprietary burger dojo, the ingredients in the kitchen are flung at random towards him where he must either pick up the ingredients he needs or parry that shit back to the ingredient box. The burgers chug along a conveyor belt so you gotta be quick on your feet collecting what you need and sorting it out without making any mistakes.
and boy howdy do you NOT need to make any mistakes!! Instead of a life counter you have a "performance score" where if it hits 0 its game over. You start with 50 points and missing an ingredient costs 1 point, mis-sorting a burger or dropping it altogether costs 5 points, and having a burger fall off the conveyor belt costs a whopping 10 points. If you lose your mojo and get in a bad rhythm of burger-making, it's incredibly easy for the burger losses to stack up quickly and end your game before you even know it. I will definitely say that the RNG nature of both the random order of what ingredients get thrown AND the customer demands can sometimes put you in a very difficult or borderline unwinnable scenerio, so sometimes its better to tank a burger loss or two to reset your groove and try to recoup your lost points. Every 10k points you get 10 performance points added to your total, and it's through clearing levels with as many performance points remaining as possible that you will get a really high score. My only real gameplay gripe is that while you CAN parry away any ingredients that you might not need to get rid of them, that's only able to be done if you aren't holding anything. If you accidentally pick up something that no customers are clamoring for, there's no way to get rid of it and it can very easily ruin an entire run as you usually have to sacrifice a whole burger to get rid of it and then by that point the mojo has been ruined and that's that. If you are trying to score high and hit that 45k point threshold to enter the prestigious Short Order Squad, it is imperative that you don't make mistakes, as your score is heavily punished for screwups, and they will build up over time. I was able to hit 49k through a decent run bolstered by good RNG, so it's not an impossibly high goal. My protip is to just always play at the highest difficulty (game 7) as it's only marginally faster than the lower difficulties yet yields way higher point gains. The manual surprisingly doesn't even mention what the difficulties do, but it does for some reason have an entire page dedicated to burger facts. Did you know the first Cheeseburger in America was served in Los Angeles in 1929? You do now!
This is a highkey banger for the system, it has a perfect level of depth, difficulty, and responsiveness to get me going alongside RNG elements that aren't absolute bullshit but just enough to constantly keep me hitting that reset button with that "i can do better next time" energy. Absolutely worth a play, probably one of my new atari favorites thus far. Activision hits it out of the park once again, so far of what I've played these guys have made better games than atari themselves!!