Burger Island is one of those games with an odd “push and pull” effect. Like the best arcade action games, it tests your reflexes as well as your memory in rapidly assembling increasingly complicated recipes. A really addictive game would usually have you glued to your screen, reluctant to pull yourself away. But Burger Island is also a game about cooking, and the dishes seem so darn tasty that you might soon start seeing visions of cheeseburgers and chili fries. Ultimately, your own appetite might distract you from the same game that stirred it up to begin with!

The story is told in an appealing comic-book format: Our heroine Patty has washed up on the shores of Burger Island with no money and no home. But when she comes across a rickety old burger restaurant, her luck changes. With a little help from the waiter Pierre, she builds her own burger empire that stretches from Tikikola Beach all the way to Honochuchu – at least, that’s the plan.

The meat of the game – pardon the pun – takes place in the kitchen of your burger shack, where you take up to 4 orders at a time, cooking various types of tropical burgers, spicy fries and creamy milkshakes. Mess up a single ingredient, or the order in which they must be added, and you mess up the order altogether – and with a limited time to reach your sales goal, you can’t afford too many mistakes.

The early levels aren’t too hard, because the recipes for the basic dishes are quite simple – just 3 or 4 items altogether. Since you only cook one type of dish in each level – burger, fries or shake – you won’t ever have to worry about accidentally getting ice cream on your burger, or chili fries in your milkshake.

But as you make more money, you’ll have the option between levels to buy new recipes from the local Tiki chef. Since your sales goals get increasingly higher as the game goes on, you want to get the recipes for the more complicated and expensive dishes so that you can make that much more money. Since each new recipe is only accessible after a certain level, your new dishes are doled out to you gradually, one at a time. There’s no strategy at all in choosing recipes, which is one of the only letdowns we found in the whole game.

As your recipes get more grandiose and incredible, your kitchen counter soon gets cluttered with exotic ingredients, from pineapple slices to bacon to Swiss cheese to various toppings and sauces – but never so cluttered as to make gameplay impossible. Eventually, about halfway through the 60 levels of the game, the pace really starts to pick up and you’ll be clicking on the ingredients with all the speed and desperation of a frantic whack-a-mole game.

Burger Island really is a charming and fun cooking game, plain and simple. The art is sweetly cartoonish, but what really gets to you is the audio: a soundtrack of groovy surf music and the drool-inducing sound effects of burgers sizzling and sauces splashing. All that’s missing is the Smell-O-Vision…but maybe eGames will save that for the sequel!

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(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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