Here are two pastimes you don't see sharing the same game very often - making burgers and solving anagrams. Thankfully, this doesn't try to put them in the same game. Instead this is a 2-4-1 that gives you two previously released titles -
Text Twist Turbo and
Burger Rush - for the price of one.
Which makes this sound as good value for money as a Maccy D's extra value meal. However, true to a typical fast food chain's ethos, this 2-4-1 might offer value, but it scrimps a bit on the quality.
Since we're talking burgers already, I'll begin with
Burger Rush, which is the better of the two titles.
At its core,
Burger Rush is a straightforward match-three type grid game similar to the likes of
Jewel Quest.
You're presented with a big old grid rammed with burger ingredients - ketchup, strips of bacon, lettuce, mad cow disease and so on - and you simply have to shuffle them about to form groups of three or more of the same ingredient.
You do this by flipping tiles with the one next to them - which you can only do if a match is going to result from the move.
Where the game evolves the matching up of pictures, though, is by having customers demanding certain combinations - such as four slices of cheese, or four tomatoes. These then have to be ticked off in order to complete the level.
There are also tokens to win by delivering orders quickly, which you can then spend on new, more expensive recipes and side orders.
The former of these gaming mechanics, however, sounds better than it actually is, since the reality of the game means you can only frantically match up what's there and hope to stumble across the right orders as opposed to putting any effort into ticking them off.
However, as our original review of the game concluded, "although
Burger Rush doesn't quite make the most of its food service premise, it remains a solid puzzler from the
Jewel Quest mould." Just like a burger then, it's gratifying but not entirely filling in the long term.
Which is an analogy which can equally be applied to
Text Twist Turbo. Like
Burger Rush, this second game in the bundle might come with a solid premise but it doesn't quite deliver a blinding game as a result.
Text Twist Turbo can't really fail to be playable, since it's a compilation of anagrams, and anagrams are fun. But it doesn't add any bells and whistles to the basic anagram format, either graphically or by having lots of different ways to play.
It works by giving you an assortment of letters - starting with five, then increasing the number - then challenging you to turn them into words of three or more letters.
You're told how many words are possible to make from the letters, so the challenge comes in finding all of the different three, four and five letters words.
Not that you have to find them all - instead, a bar is filled as you tick off words, and once it's full you get to move on to a new assortment of letters. But completists will find themselves poring over puzzles for ages trying to get every last one.
That's pretty much all there is to
Text Twist Turbo, because there are no bonuses or time limits to worry about. There's one other play mode on top of the basic puzzle one, and that gives you an anagram with one word to form from it by twisting the letters. It's not as addictive as the main game, but at least it's something else to play.
It's all quite passive and plain, but still playable. Bundling it with a more high-energy burger restaurant based game is a good idea, since the experiences are quite different. If both are the type of game you've been looking to download, it's a good value, if slightly unexciting, choice.
