Hunger Calls

Despite the fact that YO! Sushi branches are popping up left, right, and centre, there are two reasons why you'll never find me fishing it up with the rest.

Firstly, the one and only time I tried sushi it tasted like I was eating wet socks. Secondly, if I did happen to fall in love with it, I'm the kind of person who wouldn't stop lifting those dishes from the conveyer belt until I was ready to explode.

Either way, it ends up with me sitting in vomit.

In most of the levels, you take control of a conveyer belt of food. As it shoots out of the kitchen, you have to re-route the belt so each dish – initially split between hamburgers, soft drinks, fries, and puddings – reaches the right customer, identifiable by a handy thought bubble.

Whenever a customer eats too much you'll need to pop a Pepto-Bismol in a glass to stop him bringing up their insides, all before chowing down on another burger or ten when his stomach has re-settled.

All this boils down to tapping arrows placed on the conveyer belt's junctions to turn them clockwise.

Every tap you make changes the flow of the belt, with delivering the right food to the right people naturally having a positive impact on your bank balance.

The cash you accumulate can then be used to both upgrade the look of your restaurant and, more crucially, improve the taste of your food. As you might expect, the better your burgers and fries are the more you can charge your customers.

The upgrades themselves, however, don't appear to be at all weighted to balance the game, and nor do they have a notable impact on play itself.

Indeed, Hunger Calls's biggest fault is that the whole thing feels rather scatty. Additional levels, no doubt thrown in to ensure play doesn't turn stale, do manage to mix things up a bit, tasking you with simply flicking dishes at customers or clearing up orders dropped off at the wrong tables.

But it's the main mode and its muddled approach to time-management that lets Hunger Calls down.

By default, Hunger Calls's conveyer belts are slow. Even if those new to the genre happen to find them pacey, the process of switching their direction is far from engaging.

It's logical, then, that one of Hunger Calls's bonuses is a short-term speed boost. Problem is, this makes play whiz by at an unbearable pace, making it impossible to keep on top of all of the orders from start to finish.

It leaves you with an impossible choice: either watch the game trundle by before you inevitably find yourself slipping off to sleep, or boost it with bonuses that render the whole affair pointless.

Whichever approach you opt for, Hunger Calls never finds the right balance, and – like its rather bland visuals suggest - it feels like an unwelcome blast from the past rather than a measured addition to the somewhat packed time-management genre.

Like a particularly bad burger joint on a street littered with revered restaurants, there's simply no room for Hunger Calls.