Hands on with the mobile slice of Turbo Pizza

If things start to go badly wrong; if we somehow lose our jobs and get accused of heinous crimes that we didn't commit; if our families turn their backs on us and society closes its doors; if some injury renders us incapable of pursuing white-collar vocations and our professional histories are erased; if the worst comes to the absolute worst, that is, and the cyanide pills don't work, we might be forced into a job as rubbish as serving food to people.

It seems odd, then, that there are so many games about doing just that, and odder still that they tend to be quite fun.

It has been said during one of our impossibly intelligent discussions about video games that working as a waiter isn't actually so different from playing a game. You need to juggle several pieces of information at once and rapidly calculate how to dispatch your tasks most efficiently, after all, which describes playing Turbo Pizza just as well as it describes a shift in Pizza Hut.

Originally a PC casual game from I-play's parent company Oberon Media, Turbo Pizza allows you to don the apron of Rebecca as she attempt to make a restaurant in the grounds of an old castle.

It's a casual game that requires rapid fingers. Each of the six types of customer needs to be given a menu first, before you take their orders and totter off to fetch whatever they've asked for. Some foodstuffs entail a delay, such as pizzas, which need to cook, and several customers can line up at once, so keeping everybody fed and watered is a highly involved balancing act, even in the early stages.

To make matters trickier, you only have a few seconds to serve each customer before they stand up and walk away in disgust. Usually, playing a game for preview means blasting through the first few levels and assuming it gets harder later on. We managed to get stuck in Turbo Pizza after about a minute. Which is good news, of course, as difficulty, properly employed, is only longevity by another name.

As you advance through the levels and build up your cashflow, you can buy 20 different commodities, from a new counter to a course that teaches you how to make pizzas more efficiently. After a while, your bankroll enables you to expand into second premises – an underwater restaurant, no less – and there are 40 levels in all to complete.

The PC version of Turbo Pizza has generated around 1.7 million downloads, and from what we've seen so far this mobile version is just as addictive, albeit on a slightly smaller scale, with ten fewer levels and more compact playing environments. You'll be glad to hear, however, that Rebecca is just as perversely attractive as she is in the original.

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