Godlike Burger is a restaurant-management game that’s surprisingly unforgiving if you play it at normal speed. Customers come in, place an order, and then wander off to wait for their number to be called. In the meantime, you have to cook burger patties, place them on a bun, assemble the fixings, and keep the whole thing warm.
Oh, and if you don’t want to run out of meat, you also have to murder your customers once they’ve paid for their food. No, I’m not joking; that’s the entire premise of Godlike Burger.
This means you’re making mad dashes from the fridge to the stove to the hot plate to the back alley where you do much of your killin’.
However, all of the aforementioned appliances are constantly breaking down. And I’m not talking like the way stuff breaks down in The Sims — I mean that this stuff breaks down just seconds after you repair it (to be fair, you “repair” appliances by kicking them repeatedly, like some sort of science-fiction burger-frying Fonzie).
What this leads to is endless amounts of frustration, where you just start feeling out a good rhythm, then all of a sudden everything is broken and the proverbial balls you’re juggling come crashing to the ground. Plus, because you have to mash the “interact” button, you end up constantly doing things you didn’t mean to, like pulling extra ingredients out of the fridge or picking up a burger that’s still warming on the hot plate.
Now, I actually like the juggling act of Godlike Burger, which ramps up the amount of things you have to deal with over time, and then throws in some variables, like anti-meat protesters, food critics, and tiny aliens that want to steal from your fridge. It’s a frantic gameplay loop, where you have to stay on top of your various orders while defending your fridge from robbers, and also plotting to murder your guests with a series of lethal booby traps.
However, the appliance breakdown mechanic throws in a wrinkle that just doesn’t feel fun to me.
Thankfully, there actually is a way to deal with it. You can upgrade something called “Assurance,” which, at the final level of the upgrade path, will let you avoid breakdowns completely. If you want a more detailed description of this, I’ve created a guide that will hopefully prevent players from making the same mistake that I did.
And the even better news is that these upgrades are persistent, so once you buy the upgrade, you won’t have to deal with breakdowns in future runs. Well, so long as you don’t accidentally hit the “New Game” button instead of “Continue” in the main menu — which will delete all your progress. I know this, because I accidentally did it.
Crap.
To be clear, I’m still enjoying Godlike Burger. But this appliance thing has really been a thorn in my side for the entire time I’ve played it. Even once I upgraded it, I ended up having to start over because I made a really dumb mistake in the main menu.
So part of this is my fault — I admit it. But at the same time, come on, man! Could you, I don’t know, invest in some better-quality appliances for your outer-space burger business?
Disclaimer: I received a review code for Godlike Burger on Steam, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own.
Seems like you haven’t played the game too much, only about 20 mins or so because after 30 minutes, you have all the money you need to upgrade your Assurance to the level that your appliances never break down anymore.
More than 8 hours at this point.
I do feel a bit silly for not finding the option sooner. In my defense, the tutorial bugged out the first time I went through it, so I skipped a vast majority of it. When I found the “Assurance” option later on, I saw a badge and the word “Assurance,” so I assumed it had something to do with the police. I was at least 5 hours into the game before I actually read the description, and when I did, I bought the upgrades… then the game crashed, and when I started again, I accidentally hit “New Game” instead of “Continue.”
As I admit in the article, a huge part of this is my fault. However, I DID play the game for about 5 hours before I realized that “Assurance” will prevent appliances from breaking down, so I spent 5 whole hours kicking my machines. A huge part of my frustration was spending SO MUCH time with broken appliances.
This was written out to be more of a story of something I did and not a serious criticism of the game. I even wrote a quick guide on the Assurance mechanic (which I linked in this article) to prevent players from making the same mistake I did. I do apologize if it came off as overly negative, because I really did enjoy the game otherwise.