In the fast food industry today, it seems everyone wants more, more, more! Customers who were once content with a shop that just served burgers and sandwiches now want everything from breakfast food to roasted chicken to pasta. When your burger shop empire comes tumbling to the ground for no apparent reason, it's up to you and an alien-looking food device to build a new empire to serve the populace what they want: massive varieties of food!

In Burger Shop 2, you are once again tasked with combining ingredients coming from an ever-producing food machine to serve the constant stream of customers coming into the restaurant. In addition to the burgers and sandwiches that you dealt with in the first game, you will also be responsible to serve a number of breakfast and dinner items, such as bacon and eggs, waffles, roasted chicken, and meatloaf. In addition to rebuilding a successful restaurant empire, you will also be trying to figure out exactly what happened to you and the burger shops you originally built.

You start off simple, getting the hang of building the orders by combining different food items for breakfast off the conveyor belt coming out of the oddly familiar-looking BurgerTron 2000. Simple bacon and eggs orders for patient customers help you understand the mechanics of building your orders in time. Soon you are introduced to the first change: breakfast to lunch. Back to the basics of the original game, building burgers, and serving sodas. For the dinner service, you'll have to roast the chicken pieces in the oven before you can serve them to the customers.

The customers that you will be serving are as diverse as the food that you'll serve. You start off with the rather mundane, everyday restaurant goers, with standard patience and basic orders. But, as you continue, you will run into patrons that are more difficult to please. Some will be impatient, requiring you to take care of them sooner. Others, like the circus clown, will request food items that are a bit off-the-wall, making the orders more difficult to fulfill. Still others will require special attention, like the lady with the dog in her purse. Feed the dog a dog biscuit to calm it down and help the lady wait longer for her order.

In-between rounds, you'll have to opportunity to upgrade your shop with new equipment and menu items. Add a fry machine to serve crisp, hot fries with your burgers. An ice cream machine will let you serve a chilled dessert to your customers. With the addition of a shake machine, you can turn that ice cream into smooth, rich shakes. There are over 100 different recipes that you'll deal with throughout 120 levels, and as the game progresses, the recipes get more complex. You'll also find yourself rebuilding different restaurants along the way, each with a different theme, from a circus shop to an old-west saloon to a sea-side shanty. Once complete, you will again have reclaimed your Burger Shop empire, and along the way hopefully you'll find the secret to what happened to you.

Analysis: GoBit Games has come up with a real winner in the Burger Shop series. While on the surface, it seems like just another time-management game, there are a number of factors that make Burger Shop, and in turn its sequel, a cut above the rest.

I like the fact that you are not controlling a person trying to do all of the tasks in the shop. Your speed is limited only by how fast you can click on the next item that you need. Most games have you controlling a shop owner/worker that is doing the tasks as you click around the screen. You are forced to wait for the person to walk over to the next station and complete the process before they can go on to the next thing. But, in Burger Shop 2, there is no person to control. You simply have your mouse cursor. No waiting for anyone to move between stations. The click-areas are nice and large, as well, decreasing the chance that you will miss where you need to click.

The overall speed and complexity of the later levels is extremely challenging. The large variety of potential orders paired with the number of simultaneous customers and their varying wait times can make the tasks seem nearly impossible. Only the best time-management players will be able to make it through the game unscathed. And, once you do, there are expert versions of all of the levels waiting to bring you to your knees with their insane difficulty level.

Graphics are well done. The designs of all of the different devices that the BurgerTron2000 comes up with are unique, and almost photo-realistic. The designs themselves are also varied. They look like they would actually do the types of activities they are purported to do in the game. It really helps to keep you involved.

With 120 standard and expert levels, over 100 food items, and over 100 different achievement trophies to collect, Burger Shop 2 will keep you busy for a very long time. Will you be able to rebuild the empire, and solve the mystery of what happened to you and your original burger shops? Just make sure that you take a break for some real food occasionally!

Windows:
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Mac OS X:
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