Flipping burgers and serving fries makes you a success story? It does if you own your own burger franchise! That’s the idea behind Success Story, a hectic burger-themed time management game.
Down in Burgertown, Mc Moo-Moos fast food chain is in serious trouble. A professor suggested they hire robot servers to make business more efficient, so they promptly fired all their staff. Things went from bad to worse when the robots went haywire and attacked customers. Then their former employees, still holding a grudge, refused to come back to work. You play as a teenage boy, in the right place at the right time, who offers to help. Thus begins your exciting fast food career.
Flipping burgers and serving fries makes you a success story? It does if you own your own burger franchise! That’s the idea behind Success Story, a hectic burger-themed time management game.
Down in Burgertown, Mc Moo-Moos fast food chain is in serious trouble. A professor suggested they hire robot servers to make business more efficient, so they promptly fired all their staff. Things went from bad to worse when the robots went haywire and attacked customers. Then their former employees, still holding a grudge, refused to come back to work. You play as a teenage boy, in the right place at the right time, who offers to help. Thus begins your exciting fast food career.
To play, you need to fill customer’s orders quickly and accurately. Ingredients appear out of tunnels. To make up an order, you need to click on the proper ingredients in the right sequence. For a basic burger, this might mean clicking just a patty. As the game progresses, the orders become more complex, sometimes involving half a dozen different ingredients. There are also sodas, desserts, and fries which can be added to the end of an order.
Accuracy is very important. You must complete burgers in order. For example, add the patty first, then lettuce and pickles. If you try the reverse, the customer will storm off. Likewise, selecting incorrect items will cause a customer to leave. In general, accuracy is more important than speed.
The more complex the order, the more cash you earn. If you take to long filling an order, the customer will run out of patience and change her mind by ordering something simpler… and cheaper.
In addition to picking up ingredients, you can also pick up bonuses and tips. The burger bonus highlights the next ingredient needed for an order. The sale bonus boosts the price and quality of each ingredient while on-screen. The radio bonus soothes customers, so they won’t leave even if you mess up their order, and the time bonus slows down the pace so you can catch up. The robo-cook bonus puts a robot to work, cooking your burgers automatically. You can also buy upgrades and bonuses in between levels, although these take a while to unlock.
You sometimes encounter mini-games as part of the regular game play. You may also face another speed challenge, like collecting as many coins as you can. Most mini-games can be played in the main menu. In "match" you must match ingredients by type, sort of like in a memory card game. There are 10 tunnels, and you click each one to reveal an ingredient. It’s simple, and probably more appealing to kids. In "super shuffle," you rotate tiles in groups of four, trying to match the pattern shown.
Stack attack is a bit tougher. You need to shuffle tiles one by one, like a slider puzzle, in order to make the picture shown. "find the food" is confusing. I think you need to select the burger items in order, but it’s tough to figure out which tiles you should be selecting. The instructions are a bit unclear. "Xs and orders" is tic tac toe with food. “Backwards burger” has you making burgers backwards, as the name implies. You get $100 each time you solve a minigame, and you can play as much as you like. Some games are easier than others, so if you want fast cash it should be easy to earn it.
You must meet the income goals to go on to the final franchise, and might need to replay levels in order to earn enough cash to advance. The game play starts off easy, but the pace and challenge pick up drastically after a few levels. The items flip and change, and you must assemble increasingly complex orders. Customers also change their orders, making the pace very frantic. The customer’s burger orders come in threes, so you can predict how many of each item you will need, which gives you a chance to form a strategy.
As for production values, the graphics are pretty typical. The length is about average, taking roughly 3 hours to complete. The music is alright, though it can get repetitive.
It gets a bit confusing when you have multiple customers waiting. You can assemble the order for any one individual, but once you start building a particular burger you need to complete it before building the next one. It can also be tough to tell some ingredients apart when they appear in an order. For example, eggs and fish are both white slabs. Still, you can mostly guess what comes next.
Once the lids start appearing, things get a bit out of hand. You have to click twice – once to remove a lid, and once to add an item. It’s difficult to keep so many tasks in your head, and very easy to get disoriented.
Success Story is a tough game towards the middle, but the pace is generally good, and it definitely keeps you on your toes. Towards the second half of the game, some users may feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the customers’ orders. It can get frustrating to manage the lids and multiple clicks, and the customers are very unforgiving. If you’re good at multitasking, and want a real challenge, you might appreciate the difficulty in Success Story. If you get easily confused, however, it’s safe to say that you won’t have much success at all.
If you liked this game, try Burger Rush, Burger Island 2: The Missing Ingredient, and Yummy Drink Factory.
