Posted 2/23/2010 at 11:16 AM By Judgeman
The Good: Nice presentation with a lot of mini games for multiplayer.
The Bad: Not a lot of food variety and lackluster controls.
Summary: SouthPeak Games brings us another entry into the Wii cooking game genre, Fast Food Panic! Will Fast Food Panic score high marks with our gluttonous food critic, or be shut down for health violations from the health department? Find out, After the Break!
Full Review:
Full Review:
I have an issue with games that feel like a second job. Sure, we all know leveling your new professions on a Death Knight in World of Warcraft can feel like a second job, but I mean actually playing a game that is based on real life work. Well, in comes Fast Food Panic, a cooking and restaurant management game from SouthPeak Games. Does it have what it takes to win me over to this type of game genre? Let’s find out!
Story:
Ok, so there isn’t much of a story to Fast Food Panic. You play as one of two unnamed individuals who have opened up a restaurant. If you play as the male, you are the chef in charge of cooking the dishes. If you choose the female to play, you are running the front end of the restaurant and dealing directly with the customers. The premise of the game is to serve the customers the best food you can while maintaining the restaurant. As the story continues, the levels get harder and the food orders really start to fly in.
Gameplay:
The game play for Fast Food Panic is broken up into two parts. As the male chef, you main focus is to cook the orders that come in. These orders are based on four types of food. You will only be cooking burgers, pizza, pasta or crepes with small variations on each theme. My first issue was with the tutorials; I found them hard to understand exactly what the game wanted me to do with my Wiimote and Nunchuk. Most of the time, I just sat there waving my controllers around until something happened. As the chef, you must deal with the orders that the customers are placing. These orders start off coming in slow at first, but start to pile up on you if you don’t get the food out fast enough. You can multi task between dishes that you are preparing, but you really have to watch the timers so you don’t burn your food an upset your customers.
The other half of game play for Fast Food Panic is playing as the female character. She runs the front of the restaurant and deals directly with the customers. You have to greet the customers, take their orders, get the dish and then serve the customer their food. This part of the game, for me at least, seemed very tedious. The cooking side of Fast Food Panic is definitely the more interesting and fun of the two sides.
At certain points of the game, you have the option to help the other character in a mini game. These help event mini games include ringing up the sales of the dishes that you’ve prepared or cleaning the restaurant. These events usually occur right when you are the busiest. I focused my play mostly as the chef when I played Fast Food Panic, and found that these help events would always come when I least wanted them too. I found my self switching back and forth between multiple orders, greeting customers, and helping out my inept co-worker, all within short amounts of time. Honestly, SouthPeak Games did a good job in representing the real workplace to me, but it’s just a plain fact that when I come home from my day job, I don’t need to play a game that represents another work place grind.
There are a variety of mini games that can be played in Fast Food Panic, and these are great options if you are looking for some multiplayer action. The mini games are unlocked as you play through the main story mode, and include games like Ingredient Hunt (where you have to catch the target ingredient) and Delivery (a mini game that, you guessed it, makes you deliver food to people). These mini games are fun to play with other people; however, the controls just seem to get in the way most of the time.
And that brings me to my last point about Fast Food Panic’s game play, the overall controls. Games on the Wii seem to either make great use of the motion sensor controls, or have serious issues making them work. Unfortunately, Fast Food Panic falls in the latter. The controls just feel unresponsive at best, and sloppy at worst. In a game that requires exact timing, unresponsive controls can really take the fun out of the experience. I had issues in removing eggs or buns from the griddle at the right time for my burgers. If the controls did not respond, then I burnt my ingredient and had to restart from scratch. Good controls could have made this game much more enjoyable, but when you are dealing with sloppy controls, a mediocre game just becomes frustrating and irritating to play.
Graphics and Sound:
The presentation of Fast Food Panic works generally-well in that the visuals are on par for a standard Wii game and the sound works for what is required. Some of the ingredient graphics are hard to tell exactly what you are looking at, and I feel that these graphics could have been tightened up a little bit more.
Final Thoughts:
Fast Food Panic enters into a genre that is dominated by Cooking Mama and comes up short. The controls of Fast Food Panic are just not on par with where it needs to be and can range from being unresponsive to flat out frustrating. While the presentation is colorful and nice to look at, the story mode is a little light in the story department and suffers from some bad artificial intelligence from your co-worker. There are a lot of mini games that offer a great variety of games to play with others, but I wish that the developers had put some of that variety into the dishes that you cook in the story mode, and not just variations of the same four types of food. All in all, Fast Food Panic is not the worst restaurant in town, but you have far better options out there for your Wii dining experience.
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