Burger Bustle

Burger Bustle is a time management game where you get to manage the day-to-day activities of various burger joints around the country. You start the game running a beachfront property, but will soon get to do business in the wild west, in a winter town and even on a space station! Along the way, you will need to manage your employees, the types of burgers and condiments that you offer, as well as what extras such as drinks and fries you want to sell.

The way Burger Bustle works is a bit different from other time management games though, giving it a unique feel and freshness. In most other time management games, you do almost everything yourself, which works fine because your customers usually want things done in a linear fashion. For example in a typical restaurant game, you need to seat your customers, take their order, serve the food, take their cash then clean the tables.

Things are different in Burger Bustle, where the customers place their orders at the counter. Sometimes their order is pretty simple, maybe just a simple hamburger. But you will get customers who buy for their whole family, with orders that include 3 different burgers with different toppings, 2 different soft drinks as well as an ice cream dessert! There's no way a single person will be able to cook up that entire order, hence the presence and importance of your employees.

At each level, your burger joint may have up to 3 burger frying stations, up to 3 burger topping stations, up to 3 stations selling extras such as fries and drinks, as well as a packing counter. Each of these stations needs an employee there before the food can be prepared. Unfortunately, your restaurant (like most restaurants out there) is understaffed. You can get your employees to multitask, dragging them from the burger station after they finish cooking the burgers, then getting them to prepare the drinks and sides. That slows down the whole process, and may cause your customers to become unhappy as well as create an ever-growing order backlog.

You can hire more employees using the money you earn from selling burgers though, having an employee posted at each of the more popular stations. Unfortunately, each subsequent employee costs more and will cut more into your profit margins. At each level, one of the level goals will be to earn a certain amount of cash in a set time. Hiring more employees might make your restaurant more efficient, but paying these guys means that you will take longer to reach your cash goals. Balancing this requires good planning and strategy.

In most levels, you can also choose which stations you want to operate. You might start the level with just a hamburger station, with the option to buy a fish burger station, cheese and tomato topping stations and a drinks station. If you don't open extra stations, you won't need to hire employees to man them, but you might suffer an order backlog. If every customer orders a hamburger (and since the hamburger station can only cook one burger at a time), they might be in for a long wait while their order gets cooked. Again, strategic planning is required to decide whether you should invest your cash, and where you want to invest it, be it hiring more employees or opening more stations.

There is also a competitor ladder and award system in Burger Bustle game. The better you do at each level (by achieving speed records and having more customers leave the restaurant happy), you will earn points. When you earn more points than a rival restaurant, you climb the ladder and win an award. These awards usually come with a bonus upgrade for your restaurant, such as candy to keep your waiting customers happy, or coffee to make your employees work faster.

Burger Bustle has graphics that are vibrant and crisp, and is accompanied by a great soundtrack. The voice acting is really good too, with some humor thrown in as well. Overall, Burger Bustle adds a unique twist to the time management game genre, keeping it fresh and fun. And with over 70 levels (each level capable of being played in many ways), this game will be able to satisfy you for days!

Review by Steven H. Ng

Farm Craft 2

Ginger the heroin own the Farm Craft, has work very hard and become the CEO of the Tomato Corporation. But now she got an invitation from her grandparents to come and visit them are their farm, and relax a little bit. But while she was there she decided to help the farmer Robert with her skills and experience, but then she finds out he isn't the only one who need help. So she starts with her helping out the farmers that need her skills, but she also investigates why this is happening. The game consists of 24 levels, and you don't have to worry about the length of the game while every level has enough tenths of minutes to play. Besides them there are also a couple of action levels that need to be completed, but first the normal levels. Here you have to do what you mostly do on every farm game, plow the ground, seed it, water it, harvesting, and then selling. You do the selling of flowers, fruits, and crops in a barn. You can also have animals on your farm, like pigs, bees and cows. Now as for the bonus levels, even if they are pretty shorter from the normal ones, you have to perform tasks such as activating electric generators, meeting agents, avoiding to be caught by guards, or stealing special crops that the rival company is distributing around farms. There is something wrong with that specials seeds, and you must take samples to figure out what is it. As you progress you also observe as the job is building up and you can't catch up with everything. This is where the Farm Craft game stands out the most from the others. You have the possibility of hiring workers for your chores on the farm, like pickers of the fruit and vegetables, livestock breeder, a garden assistant and a crop waterier, and a manager that pays the whole gang. As this is the biggest advantage of the game it is also its biggest weakness. It's OK when the workers are collecting and working for you, but that work can sometimes cost you of the levels goal and can get a bit frustrating. But this game has a couple of aces in her sleeve. Like there are levels when Ginger has to plant something in the middle of the desert, but that requires some conditions to be satisfied, for example; you have to install irrigation plants and sprinklers. There are also levels that happen at night, and that to require its conditions, like night lights, but to start them they need electricity, and that means electrical generators, and that all so the workers can see what they are harvesting. This time management/Sim game Farm Craft 2 has a good specter of new additions, and its fun to play to, but there are some lacks that could be better done. As I said before its greatest advantage is its greatest weakness so that could be fixed up a bit. Also through the game you are able to build building but sometimes they just cost too much. But this game has a lot of its positive sides, along with the graphics which is pretty respectable. So if you are a fan of this genre, you'll definitely enjoy it, if not you have the dome and try it.

Review from SheepArcade