Burger Rush
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| Burger Rush

Without wishing to undermine the achievements of the people who toil behind counters at Burger King and McDonald's, making a burger is a fairly simple process. After years of refinement, the interiors of these kitchens are perfectly designed for compiling the ingredients of various kinds of burgers and getting them into the customers' hands as quickly as is humanly possible.

Not so in the kitchens that make up RealArcade's Burger Rush. Here, the ingredients are spread across a grid, in no particular order, and the only way to retrieve them is to swap them so that three or more of the same kind come into contact. There are patties, tomatoes, slices of cheese, leaves of lettuce, and, later, portions of ketchup, chicken and strips of bacon, all sharing the same surface. It's a sanitary disaster.

You've inherited your uncle's burger spot, goes the story, and your goal is to make it profitable by serving as many customers as you can, which you do by combining the ingredients they order before a timer runs down. For instance, if somebody asks for four patties and four slices of cheese, you'll have to make at least four of each ingredient disappear to earn the $10 fee.

As you make your way through the game, you follow a snaking course through a series of upgraded premises, and end up a giddying distance from where you started out: serving burgers in space.

Burger Rush, originally a popular online casual title, is one of the games that RealArcade has recently optimised for touchscreen control, and we're reviewing it on the LG KU990. It's available for conventional handsets, however, and while I played it with a stylus, it's just as easy to play it without.

The mechanic at the heart of the game is familiar, in that it's a match-three puzzler, but also vaguely unusual in that the board is made up of symbols that flip back to their original positions if you can't manage to match them. You may remember this twist from titles like Big Kahuna Reef and Jewel Quest.

To select a foodstuff, you tap it once with the stylus, and to swap it you tap another symbol attached to it either vertically or horizontally. With a conventional keypad you navigate with the D-pad or directional keys and select with '5', and while the stylus control is certainly nicer, the lack of one won't impede your fun.

In a business model that's far too good to ever be employed in this eternally disappointing world of ours, the quicker you serve a customer, the more tokens he'll pay you. Getting five or more ingredients in line at a time also yields tokens, as does meeting financial goals set out at the beginning of each in-game day. Reaching the 'expert' goal gives you twice as many.

Between levels you can spend these tokens in the shop, buying side orders – icons to the left of the grid depicting fries, juice, and treats – that you can bundle with the meals your customers order to get paid extra. You can also buy recipes that unlock more expensive meals, containing ingredients like chicken and bacon.

In the game itself, you can serve more than one customer at a time, so you don't need to worry about getting ingredients together in any particular order. Sometimes, it's even necessary to match ingredients nobody's asked for, just to bring the others into a place where they can be matched.

In fact, this aspect of Burger Rush's gameplay sort of makes the game's premise redundant. A customer may be asking for four tomatoes and four slices of cheese, but you rarely have the option of tailoring to individual demands. Like a real fast food technician, you just slap stuff together and hope for the best.

This isn't really a problem, because even without the strategic depth that a more refined mechanic would have provided, Burger Rush still works perfectly well. It doesn't quite fulfil its own potential, sure, but what thing involving burgers ever does? If you're looking for yet another match-three puzzler, and particularly if you have a touchscreen phone to play it on, Burger Rush is worthy successor to Jewel Quest.

Burger Rush

Although Burger Rush doesn't quite make the most of its food service premise, it remains a solid puzzler from the Jewel Quest mould
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.