Papa Louie runs fast food enterprises in a town with the most weirdly specific customers in creation. If you've played Flipline's wildly successful restaurant sim Papa's Pizzeria, you know that round these parts, nobody blinks an eye at customers who ask for a pizza with two and exactly two pieces of pepperoni per slice. These same customers will patronize your business in Papa's Burgeria. Here comes a customer who wants a well-done burger with a pickle, then a tomato slice, then a dollop of mayo. Put the tomato on before the pickle? You're taking your life into your hands, bub. Get it right, and hear that wonderful sound of a fat tip hitting the tip jar.
An excellent (if sometimes a little hand-holding) tutorial shows you the path to burger domination. On the order screen, you'll write down the exact instructions for your customer's ideal burger. Over to the grill, where you can drag out some burgers. Mouse over them to check how done they are, and when they're halfway to the point desired, click to flip them over. Once perfectly cooked, drag them to the side and hop over to the build station. Follow the order sheet exactly, dragging bun, burger, and toppings in the right order. Try not to make the thing look like the leaning tower of Beef-sa, ok? When everything's done, top the burger with the top piece of bun, which will send the burger onto a tray. Drag the ticket down onto the tray and you'll present your meaty offering for grading. Drum roll and... it's a trifecta of perfect scores! Well, at least you hope it is. The higher the score, the happier the customer, which not only means a good tip now, but also adds a point to his or her "star gauge". Once the gauge fills up completely, you'll earn star badges, all the way to a gold star customer. Gold star customers tip the most of all.
By making your customers happy, you'll earn customer points which will improve your rankings. As you move up in the rankings, new customers start coming by, and the overall complexity of the orders and number of things you have to juggle at once increases. However, you can use all those tips you've been collecting in the upgrade shop between levels, buying things to keep your customers happy while they wait and tools like doorbells and meat warmers to help you keep things rolling backstage.
Analysis: I spent a slightly embarrassing amount of time on Papa's Pizzeria back in the day, playing the game steadily for months until I had gold-starred each and every customer (and I have the Kongregate badge to prove it). The sequel has the same kind of long-term addictive appeal. This isn't a game that you play for hours at a stretch. It's the same thing over and over, pretty much, and new customers are more "the same thing only kicked up a notch" than "new and exciting twist". But it is a game that calls to you pretty regularly for "just one level". Each level takes only a few minutes to play, so it's a perfect game for coffee breaks, and you definitely get a sense of long-term progress as your customer roster grows and your burger joint fills up with posters, a TV and a gumball machine, yum.
Just like the previous game, Papa's Burgeria stands out from its time management brethren by making you really do everything yourself. You don't just click on a station and send your avatar scurrying to assemble a burger--you yourself squeeze the mustard and arrange the lettuce just so, adding an element of skill to the usual timing challenges. Another great advantage is that because of the focus on improving customers as individuals and building customer points as a whole, you can never get to a point where you get stuck on a level through inability to hit a target (and therefore can't progress at all in the game). There's no target, so even if you have a terrible time on a level, you can never go backwards in the game as a whole. The absolute worst thing that can happen to you is if you treat a customer really badly, like you serve them a burger that's burnt on one side and raw on the other and you forget all their toppings, their star gauge can drop to zero, which is a set-back but not insurmountable. This helps balance the admittedly hectic pace and the series' hallmark ordering neuroticism.
When it comes to simulation games in flash, it doesn't get any better than this series. Papa's Burgeria's burger-flipping fun just might make you forget that your own lunch break is slipping away.
There are now ads in the *middle* of the game.
It seems like one thing to have them on the sides and beginning, and another to have them interrupting the experience. It's not even like this is currently *so* popular it's killing your servers, right?
I don't want to be too harsh - I know you have to make up costs - but this is hugely offputting.
[The ads are controlled by Flip Line, not by us. That said, Flip Line has permitted us to host the game at Jayisgames.com without ads, so I've moved the file from our external media server to JIG, which should eliminate the inter-level ads. We are not fans of inter-level ads at all, and we try never to host any games here with them. Thanks for the feedback. Please reload the page and play it again. -Jay]
I think the dropping of ingredients onto the bun stack is extremely annoying and really brings the whole process down...
Played this for a while (up to rank 15) and, as mentioned in the review, it is very slow moving. Frustratingly so from my perspective. The beauty of sim games is the ability to multi-task in that you let the game run while you do work and other things online. On the other hand, time management games require quick thought and quick clicking.
In this game, though, there is no skipping the boring "order taking process" as well as the unnecessary "burger inspection process" plus you must watch the burgers carefully. I think this is a good game to show youngsters as to why they'd want their high school diploma/college education... flipping burgers is not fun.
The graphics are cute and I did stick with it long enough to build a few upgrades to see if they improved matters... but the time it takes to get enough cash for the upgrades was beyond my patience.
Fun game but Monster Burger (I think that's what it was called) did this so much better. Each level just seemed to get more monotonous, not more difficult. Nice graphics though...
Sooo.... I played until I got up to rank 45, day 97, and every customer up to Roy got a gold star rating, but I could not reveal the last customer! The game keeps saying that if I get a gold star for every customer, I'll see a special guest, but it's not happening.
I must be some kind of crazy because I absolutely love playing this game. It's a good work out for my brain, juggling everything around, trying to figure out exactly what order to do things in to put out quality burgers in the fastest possible time. I feel shortening how long it takes to take an order or inspect a burger would run counter to the game itself. It's these large chunks of time that you need to plan for or you'll burn whatever you have cooking.
In comparison to the Pizzeria edition, one very welcome change is that customers who you still need to earn a gold star on take precedence over characters you've already maxed out. People that played to Papa Louie on the previous one will know why this is a convenient difference. I also like that having a good mental catalog of who orders what is useful; I can get their burgers cooking before taking the order proper, shaving off a little service time.
I have a complaint, and a question.
Complaint: dammit, now I'm craving a nice cheeseburger.
Question: does it ever go past 10 customers in a day?
I had the same problem atomic. I'm up to day 97 rank 44 everyone including Roy has a gold star rating and it won't unlock the last picture - very frustrating. Does anyone know how to unlock the final customer?
Man, I love this game. ♥
This game made me hungry...(saw the screenshot, freaked out momentarily at the guy with floppy hair and a brown coat OMG TENTH DOCTOR...realized that was stupid, played the game anyway). I don't particularly love this sort of game, but I respect it. Good stuff.
I loved this game for a month playing a level or two a day. I am on rank 45 "better than papa" day 100 and revealed the last guest "papa". I have a gold star on everyone including papa and its still going. When do I beat this darn thing?
@TheFez: I did the exact same thing! DOCTOR WHO RULES! But seriously, that does look like David Tennant. Hey, imagine this:
A game where you must shuttle various time travelers through time to different locations, in EXACTLY THE RIGHT ORDER. It's...
Doctor's TARDIS-ia!
They need to make a Papa's Pizzeria.
["They" already have: https://jayisgames.com/archives/2007/11/papas_pizzeria.php -Jay]
This game had severely diminishing returns for me around Day 30. For a while I was motivated by collecting stuff in the waiting room, but in trying to get the last item (jukebox) I just stopped caring. The tedium and mindsplittingly hideous graphics just got to me. Up until that I was having a good time though.
PROS: I like the timing because it is not contrived like many TM games - cooking while multitasking is a real-life time management scenario.
CONS:
- I didn't like the drag-and-drop. I don't think that takes skill, just hurts your hand. Just clicking the items would have gotten the point across fine.
- It was fun to upgrade for a while, but it would have been nice to feel the impact of the purchases I made. I'll just have to take their word for it that it raises the waiting score (by how much?)
- Is it just me, or are the levels not getting discernably harder after a certain point?
- Again, the graphics alone almost repulsed me from this game entirely. I'm glad I gave it a shot though because it was fun for a few hours.
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