Take the fast food industry by storm in this management sim! Overtake rivals, design new menu items, and collect furnishings for your stores as you work to expand your small starting restaurant into a popular chain spanning a city.
Creating new recipes is a major part of this game. From your restaurant’s test kitchen you can create new recipes, including of main dishes, sides, drinks, and desserts. Sides, drinks, and desserts are more simple than side dishes, letting you combine a smaller number of ingredients that have predetermined outcomes. You have full control over what ingredients are used in the main dishes, regardless of how well the ingredients mix. Want a towering burger made of nothing but meat? Go right ahead! Want a sandwich full of fruit that uses pancakes for buns? Entirely possible! You can track the popularity of the food based on the ingredient combos as well as other attributes such as spiciness, temperature, or weight before completion.
The food’s attributes are important when it comes to popularity in different stores. Each location where you can open a new store features clientele with different tastes. Some areas prefer sweet foods, others prefer dense foods, and so on. When a potential customer arrives outside your restaurant, you’ll have the opportunity to impress them with a dish of your choice. You’ll be given hints on their preferences, though they generally fall into the taste of the area. If you impress them, they’ll return to your store as regulars.
Unlocking new ingredients is achieved either by satisfying potential customers, completing new research projects, or updating partnerships with various suppliers such as a bakery, deli, or general store. You’ll later unlock a way of trading for specific ingredients, but the main way you’ll collect ingredients is by sending out staff to restock. The location you send them to and the staff member’s personality type determine what items they are most likely to come back with.
You have full control over each store. Larger stores are more expensive to open and maintain than smaller ones, but they have room for more furnishings such as tables and registers, can have more recipes on the menu at once, and have room for additional expansions such as drive-thru windows. Advertisements can also be set for each store individually.
Rivals exist in this game though they aren’t highly fleshed out. When you start, rival restaurant chains will control most of the other locations on the map. As you continue to play and start outperforming them during the end-of-year ranking, their locations will gradually start to close. Once a rival location closes, you’ll be free to purchase the area to open your store.
A major difference between this game and many other Kairosoft games is that time only stops when you’ve opened a menu. Whether you’re moving between different restaurants or looking at locations on the world map, time is constantly moving forward. This plays into another change, which is that you have complete control over every store at once rather than just operating the main store while the rest of the stores run on autopilot.
These changes lead to the game feeling busy compared to some other titles, particularly once you’ve opened multiple restaurants. You have to manage recipes, advertisements, and staff for each store, leading to a lot of micromanagement in the second half of the game. Recipe creation begins to take longer and longer as you collect new ingredients and unlock new slots to add ingredients. You eventually unlock helpful abilities such as the power to automatically set advertisements for dishes rather than having to handpick them, but it would have been nice to see that unlock as soon as you start opening new stores.
Burger Bistro Story is a fun game, but the pacing of unlocking quality of life features isn’t paced as well as in other Kairosoft titles. Whether or not you’ll find this game enjoyable all the way through depends on your affinity for micromanagement. If you don’t enjoy it, the game starts to drop off about halfway through. However, if you enjoy the extra control over your various buildings, you’ll find this to be a really solid Kairosoft entry.
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