Viking Burger: Historic Figure in Present Day to… Serve Burgers?

viking burger windows phone

Viking Burger sees a Viking, controlled by the player, working at a modern-day fast food burger joint. No real reason is given for his appearance there, but the ensuing game is funny and well done.

The game features just the one mode, story mode. Levels here are interlinked with humorous cut scenes. An intolerant and intolerable Viking is working for a similarly ill-tempered fast food restaurant manager. Why? Somehow, the Viking has incurred a debt to the aforementioned manager.

The game does not feature stunning high def graphics, but the graphics it does feature look good despite this. They look rugged somehow, but look good, unrefined yet exude clarity; the burger joint looks unsanitary, but somehow real; sauce and burger juice splatter across the screen as the Viking slaps down ingredients onto the worktop.

Gameplay follows a few simple principles, but all the while manages to be engaging. Before loading the game I speculated it may be similar to Cake Mania, a time-management food-delivery game (there are several iterations of this game, and I previously reviewed Cake Mania: Main Street for BestWP7Games.com). The fact that I am making burgers against the clock aside, the two games could not be more disparate in their implementation and gamification of the service industries.

After the initial cut scene (there is one between each set of levels), you see the Viking’s workstation. In the top left there appears an image of the required ingredient. In the bottom right you see the number of burgers required for this level, whilst in the top right is a pause button (pressing the physical back button has the same effect). Along the top is the ‘rage bar’ (more on this later). The key part of the on-screen display is the ingredient-selection tool: this is a wheel above the workstation, such that you rotate to the right ingredient (whichever matches the image in the top left) and then swipe down to slap it onto the table in truly brutal Viking fashion. I found the controls intuitive and simple, although perhaps the top left box should have been more central as I found myself dividing my gaze between ingredient-selection and verifying it matched. The rage bar was a measure of the Viking’s rage but effectively works as a timer and all the burgers need to be made before it fills – or else there will not be any customers living long enough to protest their lack of service that day.

After each level, faster completion means less rage as the Viking goes on a killing spree to vent his rage on the customers and calm down. This move makes no business sense (let alone serves to make ridiculous the proposition that he is working to pay off a debt) but it offers up some twisted comedic moments in the cut-scenes. It would be interesting if in the six ‘chapters’ the killing could be made into more of a gameplay feature and less of a post-level cut-scene; I do not know what that would be, but I am putting the idea out there.

When making a burger, it is possible to make it using the wrong ingredients. Aside from the horror of putting a chicken burger patty into a beef burger (yep, I did that – one is slightly paler than the other), there are also ingredients you really do not want going out to the customer such as keys and mousetraps. Making my mistake and putting the wrong meat into a burger will cost you your tip, but making a mistake like swiping down on the keys will necessitate a complete restart on that burger. Just remember to take your house keys out before tossing the whole thing in the bin… When each tray of four is filled up, the tray goes out to the customer and, if you made four good burgers, will return with a tip. This is collected just by tapping on the coin. I do not know where the money is measured, but it possibly reduces his rage slightly; I could not verify this.

I found the game fun to play, the controls were simple but effective and worked well and the graphics, not pretending to represent the real world, were actually good. (This point on the graphics is hard to explain – just check out screen shots below.) Check out the Trial and decide for yourself if it is worth your $1.49. You can check out the developers website here

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Viking Burger Screenshots

Version Under Review: 1.5.0.0

This game costs $1.49, and there is also a Trial version available; the Trial is limited to the first chapter.

Our Rating for Viking Burger

Scan this QRcode with Bing vision ( Hit the hardware Search button and click on the small icon that looks like an eye ) on your Phone to download the App to your phone.

Price : $1.49