Developed by Liquid Pug and published by Daedalic Entertainment, Godlike Burger is a restaurant management sim with a dark secret. While you serve customers from all around the galaxy, they do not know that they might be included in the next meal prepared by your kitchen. In Godlike Burger, your goal is to make burgers, feed customers, and then kill your customers and turn them into ingredients for your next customers. The never-ending cycle continues every day as you travel a huge galaxy looking for your next targets. This is our review of Godlike Burger in which we cut down some aliens and make delicious burgers out of them.
The game starts with a two-day tutorial that explains everything from cooking to killing and once you complete it, you are all set to begin your own killing spree on various planets. What sets Godlike Burger apart from traditional restaurant management games is that in Godlike Burger, you are feeding your customers and then killing them later in various devious ways in order to gain more meat and body parts to use in your next day’s burgers and recipes. Since the game is already set in the space, your customers include various races and specifies that you have not encountered before. Each planet in the game has its own unique species. As you serve and observe these aliens, you can fill out their details in your journal such as their likes, dislikes, and activities that they like to do. Each race is unique, so you need to observe and make notes about all of them.
This is really some investigative work in the game however it adds an extra chore to your list while you are cooking in your kitchen. Each customer after visiting your restaurant places an order and goes about doing what they like and have to do. Certain races prefer loitering around smoking and doing nothing while some will head to the VIP section for a dance. You have to figure everything out and prepare your next move in advance. As you serve customers, you will earn money along with Prestige Scale Points which is your restaurant’s rating in the whole galaxy. The higher this rating goes, the more customers your place will start to attract.
While you are free to kill all customers that walk in, you must send some of them away as only living customers will increase your Prestige Scale Points. Money is earned right when your customer picks up their burger from the order counter so if you want to increase your Prestige Scale Points, you need to send them away. For killing customers, you can use various traps around your restaurant or simply use your kicks and cleaver to kill them. After the slaughtering is done, you must hide your tracks by hiding the body and washing your clothes as well because bodies and blood-soaked clothes increase the customer’s annoyance level.
If it reaches maximum, they run away, and you will be awarded a police badge. Receive enough badges and a police team will visit your establishment for investigation if found guilty, you will be killed but you can survive the onslaught as well if you are good at fights. Depending on what race sees the body or blood, some will run away while some will become aggressive on their own and start fighting you. In such cases, you must watch out for your health because if it goes down, you will be dead and you will lose all your meat, money, Quest progress, and Prestige Scale Points. This is not a good option if you have invested hours into your current playthrough.
You also need to watch out for each customer’s wants and needs and check their annoyance level counter in their icons. Preparing and delivering the wrong food will result in unhappy customers and you will not earn any Prestige Scale Points when they leave unhappy. While using sauces, you also have to watch out which sauces work on what species since certain aliens are immune to certain things. This encourages a trial-and-error formula since I had to try out different things and then finally succeeded in my treacherous plans. You can add and delete information in your journal about each of the alien races in the game and it is very convenient.
To kill a customer, you can either use traps laid down around your restaurant or you can rig your burgers with various sauces that you create in your basement. If you want to kill with sauces, you will need to serve the customer with their order with the respective sauce in it and then wait until the sauce does its magic. Once the effect is triggered, follow the customer and make your move once the move is right. If you want to kill customers using your traps, you must understand their behaviors and then use your knowledge to lay down traps and then kill them when no one is around. Finally, you can always use your kicks and your trusty cleaver to beat down customers and kill them for your supplies. Knowledge is key in Godlike Burger so make sure that you are always taking notes in your journal.
The basement is where you will spend your nights and prepare for the massacre of the next day. Here you will find various facilities which are essential for running your restaurant. For starters, all of your inventory is located in the basement which includes your ingredients along with all of the body parts that your meat processor added to your inventory. You can use the processor to create new spices as well which are used primarily for inducing various effects on your customers. Apart from this, you can use your computer to order new ingredients, purchase guidebooks for unlocking all of the information on races, and check customer feedback from the previous day. This gives you insight into what particular races liked and disliked about your orders.
You can also use your office phone in the basement to pay off your bills and also bribe the police if you want to have your police badges removed for the next day. Finally, if you want to travel to a new planet, you can do so from your basement as well. Other activities here include purchasing upgrades for your chef as well as your kitchen. These upgrades cost a lot, but they make you more effective in killing and your kitchen more effective in cooking. You can only get access to the basement during the night and once you have completed your day. As you complete more and more days, you can also unlock bonus costumes that you can wear on your next day of killing and cooking spree.
While there is not much of the main story, game progress can be checked with the help of quests which change with every playthrough. These quests give you certain tasks that you need to complete on each planet. There are 10 planets in total and as you progress, the planets and the races you encounter on these planets become harder and harder. Each planet also gives you an increased payout per day, but the risk is also greater there. The game works on the classic high-risk, high-pay formula however you are completely free to just stick to the first planet for as much time as you want and upgrade your kitchen and yourself without any worries. The main quests are not that easy to complete so they take a good amount of time anyway.
Apart from the normal challenges of the game, sometimes you will also have to deal with natural disasters which are obviously not that natural for us but pretty normal for the world featured in Godlike Burger. These include Meteor Showers, Zombie Attacks, and many others. You cannot control these disasters, but you have to manage them and try to not ruin your day. One of the issues I found with these challenges was that even if they are completely out of our hands, still the game treats them as if they are our own fault. For example, a meteor fell on a customer, and he died, and another customer saw his body and ran away which resulted in my getting a police badge. This is pretty unfair, and I had to spend money for it to go away.
The game is also designed primarily for playing with a controller. As you switch from a keyboard to a controller, you instantly feel your game getting better and the inputs become easier as well. I did encounter some input issues while playing with a keyboard as I had to move back and then again forward to interact with certain items. This was most common with the order delivery counter as it would not register me near the counter, and I had to move around and then come back to the counter to finally deliver the cooked food. These issues are not present if you play the game with a controller. The game would have been much better if it had mouse support as well since you could have moved around and used the mouse to attack people and interact with objects but so far this is not an option in the game but one that I do hope to see in the game in the coming months.
Another problem with Godlike Burger is how the game treats your death. If you are dead in the game, you lose all your planet access and other important things as well which take a long time to finally unlock and explore. Before starting the game, I was not aware of how the game incorporates roguelite mechanics in it, and when I found out about this mechanic, I was not impressed by it at all. I would have preferred if the game had checkpoints after completing quests and unlocking new major milestones such as gaining access to a new planet. Interplanetary travels take a lot of money in the game, and this makes taking risks a little problem in the game. This seriously negates the high-risk/high-reward factor because you need to take certain risks in order to maximize your revenue and if you die instead, you lose everything that you have been grinding for.
Overall, Godlike Burger is challenging, addictive, and hard to master. You can understand the game mechanics fairly easily however mastering it requires a lot of time and you need to be extremely quick with your fingers to satisfy customers and then kill them for more ingredients. The game offers a lot of things that you can use to your advantage in the game which is a great thing. The alien species are designed pretty well, and the overall visual presentation of the game is really great as well. I was really looking forward to playing Godlike Burger ever since I received its first press release just because I liked how the game looked. True the game requires balancing and the roguelite mechanics make the game a little bit harder than it has to be but to conclude this review, Godlike Burger is a decent yet challenging restaurant sim that deserves your attention.
Final Verdict:
Godlike Burger is a challenging restaurant simulator with a twist, and I personally really enjoyed the overall concept of the title. However, in trying to execute everything at the same time, the game currently suffers from some issues which can be fixed easily but given that the game was released two weeks ago, we are still here with some of the pertaining issues unsolved. I am not a fan of the roguelite mechanics incorporated in the game title because they just render the grind useless because if you die, you are bound to lose your progress in the game. In a nutshell, Godlike Burger is a treat for players looking for a challenging title allowing them to run an evil restaurant but then again, I will wait for a little for some balancing fixes in the game before investing more time into it.
Final Score: 7.5/10
