Meteor Café
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| Meteor Cafe

Building a business from scratch is tough work.

You start off owing money to someone (hopefully a bank and not gangsters), then you have to essentially work 20-hour days just to keep your bank balance level for a good year or more, weekends and all.

In Meteor Café’s world, building a business is far simpler - all you need is fast reactions and good eyesight.

Café Neo

The aim of the game is to grow your fledgling café business into an entrepreneurial paradise, expanding into various different locations and serving up progressively fancier dishes.

You do this by throwing food at customers so that it lands on their plates. Not what I would have done, but it’s certainly effective at feeding customers quickly.

Each guest to the café-cum-restaurant shouts out a coloured item. By pressing the corresponding key on the phone, you chuck that dish towards them and they happily munch it all down.

As the game progresses, people start ordering multi-tiered food that require a few extra colour-matches to prepare before being paid. These have an annoying habit of ‘sticking’ so that the next button press required takes an age to appear, but are otherwise fairly harmless.

Diner rest

Unlike in the similar-looking Diner Dash, there’s no rushing around, fixing one problem, picking up dishes, collecting checks, or screaming at the screen for dealing up yet another baby when the restaurant is filled with businesswomen.

Instead it’s a case of colour-matching for the entire game. Get the colours right quickly, and you get paid – simple.

As your ‘fame’ increases (through successful servings) so you can move on to the various different locations in the game, ranging from an alpine ski lodge to extraterrestrial planets.

Other than the looks, the locations aren’t really that different – there are no ‘special’ customers that require specific attention – but they do unlock higher level items that, in turn, allow for higher pay, longer shifts, and more orders to deal with at once.

This simple mechanic – match the colours – means that while Meteor Café is good fun for a short period of time, the repetitive and simple nature of gameplay doesn’t stand up to a five-year business plan.

Meteor Café

Fun in short bursts, Meteor Café lacks the depth to sustain interest in the long term
Score
Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).