Lunch Break

Frankly, we don't need this game to remind us how little we'd want to work in a busy restaurant at lunch time. We spend far too long sitting and flexing only the muscles in our fingers – if someone expected us to remember orders, juggle trays and hurry from one end of a room to the other it'd be some shock to the system. You might as well ask us to get out of bed and jump into an ice cold bath at 2am. The reaction would be the same.

The mobile game Lunch Break being essentially a simulation of how miserable it is serving time-harassed people with lunch, then, doesn't bode well.

Except there are plenty of games which deliver a similar experience (Diner Dash 2, for instance) of serving the virtual public with food, drinks, cakes and whole assortments of other things that are brilliant. Anything can be made fun with the right approach, it seems.

Alas, Lunch Break seems to shun the crazy idea of making table waiting fun, and sticks with cold realism. As a result, it ends up as a game which very quickly begins to feel like hard, unrewarding work itself. And without the hard cash tips as the end.

Its premise is quite simple. Taking control of a waitress in a busy restaurant, you seat customers at one of five tables, take their order once they're ready, bringing them their food and then collecting the money. So far, so reasonable, but it's the way Lunch Break chooses to replicate this in such a no-frills fashion that is disappointing.

To take an order you simply click on the food icon which appears over a customer's head. The icon doesn't change once you've clicked it so it's easy to forget which orders you've then taken – possibly a deliberate inclusion to test the player, but it's annoying. A few seconds later, the ordered food then appears at the bottom of the screen for you to click on to pick up, then re-click on the customer's icon to deliver.

Essentially, then, all Lunch Break really involves is a lot of scrolling around a restaurant screen clicking on icons and trying to remember which you've already done. There's no feedback – customers don't get stroppy if you keep them waiting, or leave without paying. The only incentive you have for going quickly is that an invisible time limit is ticking and you have a target of total money to make in order to move onto the next level.

The one feature that does add some substance to the game is being able to upgrade parts of your restaurant in between levels in order to improve performance. I found it incredibly hard to get that far, though. The game's learning curve is practically vertical, with you earning only a few dollars profit for each level (if you're lucky) and the upgrades costing way more. You also have to keep bettering the previous level's takings, and seeing as my fingers were working flat out just to complete the first level, there was little hope for beating many subsequent ones.

One final criticism is that occasionally Lunch Break felt a little bit unresponsive, too. There were times when I was clicking to pick up orders and my waitress just wouldn't do it. In a game where every second counts and being systematic is the only way to win, being forced to pick up a burger when you want to deliver a coffee is massively annoying.

All that considered, along with the fact there are far better games of its type available on mobile, it's impossible to recommend this particular restaurant gets a Michelin star. A more realistic scenario would be to report it to the authorities for serving up slightly iffy, gone-off produce.