Hands-on with Fat Princess and flOw developer SuperVillain's Order Up!! To Go on iPad
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Food sims are multiplying like fungi on the iPad. Order Up!! To Go, from Fat Princess creator SuperVillain Studios, tries to add some complexity to the restaurant-management genre. Our hands-on showed some promise.
You play a wannabe restaurant impresario who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Using your hands-on management, you cook your way through several newly purchased restaurants.
Ultimately, you’ll end up running the snooty restaurant on the hill, but it all begins with a McDonald’s clone serving – you guessed it – burgers and fries.
Everything is made to order, so you have to drop the fries in the grease and, with a flick, raise them before they burn, and slice up the tomato in precise, orderly fashion à la Fruit Ninja. A meter tells you when food is done.
Octopus advantageMultitasking is encouraged, if not necessary, so you'll be dunking fries, burning bacon, stripping lettuce, and flipping burgers simultaneously.
The graphics are surprisingly big, so you have a nice clean focus on your current task even if most of your time is spent flicking the screen left or right to go to another part of the work station. Later levels get even more complex, with baking and other more nuanced skills coming into play.
Order Up!! To Go also contains business-management elements since, as in a real restaurant, you have to buy food to sell it. More expensive food sells well, but low-to-medium-cost products will keep you in business, especially in the beginning.
Order Up!! To Go isn't looking like a breakthrough in the genre, but the bold characters and smooth gameplay will make it one of the better examples. The Universal app will be out in January.