Have you ever worked at a fast food restaurant? Honestly, I now think that I have. That's the experience you get here in Fast Food Simulator. The premise of the game is simple. You run a generic fast food burger restaurant and have to deal with prep work, constant customer orders, inventory management, and cooking.

The problem we run into these days is that there are so many "Simulator" games out there that it's hard to determine which ones are actually worth the money and which are basic cash grabs. Well, after playing over 7 hours of Fast Food Simulator, I can safely say that this game meets the full criteria of working in a fast food restaurant. Let me explain...

Starting out with the environment. The restaurant itself is very well laid out. You could imagine this being an actual functional restaurant. It's got everything from a freezer unit and a dumpster to a french fry warmer and soft drink (syrup) system. I really can't find any flaws with the restaurant. It's like the developers have actually moonlighted as fast food employees. It even has customer washrooms and a manager office, although at present there isn't anything to do with them.

Continuing with the "simulation" experience, food is also very well handled in this game. Now I've only played the normal difficulty, but I found that there's just enough reality that you really get the experience of making food, without it being too monotonous. For example, you can cook up several trays of burger/chicken patties before your restaurant opens and nobody will complain that they're cold even 12 hours later. That said, there are things you need to properly time because ice will melt in soft drinks, ice cream will get warm, and french fries will get cold if they spend too long on a tray before being served.

This might sound like a huge workload, and believe me it can be, but the developers have thought of that. From my own experience, my fiancee and I were actually doing pretty good until we unlocked the "Drive Thru". That's when we got completely slammed and buried in so many orders we had customers walking out. Thankfully, the developers added the ability to shut off the drive thru window for people who are playing in smaller groups (or solo). The developers also added the ability to have several non-player employees. While these employees don't do any of the cooking, prep work, stock ordering, or getting drinks/icecream (yet) what they do handle is the momentous tasks. You have one employee who will deliver trays to customers. You have another employee who will clean tables and gather the bills. You have a third employee who can take orders. Finally, you have a fourth employee who can unload the delivery truck for you. Each of these employees costs only $30 a day, so it's really not a huge expense.

The best part of the game, or rather the part I enjoy the most, was the building of the burgers. As you continue to level up you unlock more ingredients and the burgers get more complex. It's so satisfying to develop your prep area so you can efficiently craft the custom burger orders as they come in. One customer might want 4 onions, 2 pickles, and a squeeze of mayo. The next might want 2 patties, a tomato, and no condiments. Some of the burgers you look at and go, "WTF?" while others you're going, "Oh man, I want that burger". That said, the developers lead you into this very gently with your first few experience levels actually having no topping or condiments of any kind. After a level or two you unlock ketchup, then another couple levels later you get lettuce, etc, etc, etc. At present there are 3 condiments and 4 toppings (5 if you include cheese at level 25-ish, which gets "melted" on the burger patty as it's cooked)

It was pretty interesting playing this game because it wasn't long before my fiancee and I started feeling like the restaurant actually WAS our own. We could walk around the kitchen area and actually tell you what was in each cupboard and fridge. When a truck rolls in with a new load of supplies, there's no question as to where everything gets put. When we walked into the building in the morning we knew exactly what needed done, what prep items go where, and how to setup for the day. We knew what our inventory levels should be and when to order. We knew how many burger patties (approx) we'd need to prepare, how many chicken patties (approx) we'd need to have cooked up, and how many bags of fries to cook before we opened the doors for the day.

Speaking of prep, one thing I absolutely love is the fact that the day starts at 9AM but the time doesn't actually move until you open the restaurant. You have an unlimited (I think) amount of time to do your pre-open prep work for the day. Likewise, at 9PM the last customer leaves and you again have unlimited time to prepare for the next day. This is when I like to submit the shipping order because at the end of the day is when we do all our refills (condiments and toppings) for the next day, so we get a good picture of what we actually need.

All in all, when you're talking simulators, I really think Fast Food Simulator is a great game. It's a ton of fun with friends as well. Lag is non-existent, there's zero desync, and you can even set your game as public and lock permissions if you don't really trust those who might be joining you. As you all know, any game that has good co-op gets a big kudos from me.

So now you're saying, "Ok Jodian but your reviews are always no-nonsense, so what's the bad side of it?"

Ok, so there are a couple of things I found that are more of bugs or feature suggestions than anything else. First off, even if you mark a tray as being ready, it doesn't come off your order window until it's actually in the customer's hands. This can lead to some confusion, especially when you have a long list of orders waiting, as there's nothing to indicate to you that you've already done the order that's showing as the next order on the screen. This led to me, more than once, unintentionally creating the same burger twice (which had to be tossed out). I did discover that you can "hide" the order manually if you focus on the screen, however I feel this should happen automatically when you set the tray as "done".

Another problem we ran into was when we first hired our cashier. The cashier appeared at the back of the store, outside, and stayed there even through the next day after we had opened. I had to fire them and rehire them to fix the problem so they'd actually work. Simple solution to a bug that I have no doubt will be fixed. Speaking of, the developers are very active and have a lot of in-game notes for "coming soon" features. I even noticed some possible future maintenance tasks (specifically in the customer washroom) as you can interact with things like the toilet paper holder, sinks, toilets, etc but at this time they don't actually do anything. As is, the game is fully playable right up until level 30 and even if that's where the game ended it would be worth the $20 asking price.

So do I recommend it? Absolutely. If you're into these kinds of games you'll really like this one. There are more detailed restaurant games out there, for sure, but this one is certainly a lot of fun. I have high hopes and expectations for this title.

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For more no-nonsense reviews check out my curator page at;
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45052020/

If you plan on playing solo, don't play this game. It is NOT solo friendly. Everything involved in the kitchen you do yourself, there is no staff to help you. The 4 staff you do have (2 of them being pointless) also don't help you. Cashier doesn't prep drinks or ice cream. Stocker only takes boxes off the truck and places them on a shelf that's not located in the kitchen either. Busser should do what the server does and the server should be deleted.

If you plan on playing this game only with friends, go ahead but other than that don't do it.

Wasn't planning on leaving a review but since the game's release almost 5 months ago, they've basically only added some difficulty settings and one medium-sized update. Game is fun at its core but way too barebones and desperately needed more content. This isn't exactly an AAA game, one update (which wasn't even that big in the first place for me to want to play more) over 5 months is pretty tragic.

Game is pretty much abandonware at this point, don't buy it.