Burger Together is a unique entry in the restaurant simulation genre by PlayThisGame. It adds depth with resource gathering and revamps social gameplay with low commitment teamwork.

Story

The story follows a young woman on her journey to open a restaurant. With the help of a local farmer, an eager chef, and a business mogul, that dream becomes a reality.

Gameplay

You have two separate spaces to utilize and decorate: your farm and your restaurant. The game is a balancing act between producing enough resources for your restaurant to run at maximum capacity and maintaining high-quality cookers.

Farm: Place utility structures like cow pens, fruit trees, and wheat fields to produce resources you will need to turn into food for your restaurant. Unlike farming sims, you do not have to wait for the full timer to collect your goods. Products can be collected at any point during their production and it will reset the timer.

In order to place utility buildings, you have to keep your sanitation above 0 (the number next to the four-leaf clover). Sanitation is increased by decorative items.

Burger Restaurant: Like other restaurant simulators, you need to place cookers, serving counters, and tables to feed your hungry customers. Without tables, your guests will purchase take out, but you’ll earn tips if they have a place to sit.

Each cooker requires certain amounts of goods to produce their items.

The cookers and serving tables are broken up into categories: Burgers, Sides, Drinks, and Specials. Burger serving tables can only display burgers and so on.

This game has limits on the number of serving counters and cookers you can have active at a time. You will need to store older cookers to place newer ones. NPC managers can be upgraded to increase them.

Quests: This quest system is fluid, and there’s always something to work towards. Besides main story quests, like adding a new cooker or expanding your shop, there are additional quests. These bonus quests cycle through producing certain foods, selling or collecting resources, and tending elements of other people’s farms.

Social Gameplay: Temping & Franchises

Of course, with a name like Burger Together, there is a social component. However, the integration is smart and non-invasive. Gone are the days of nagging friends to join or annoying all of your Facebook followers with invites.

You can select people from a list of suggested players and add them like you’re following them on Twitter. This creates a list of people whos farms and restaurant you can interact with. In return, you can be followed back or followed by others with no need to follow back.

You can visit each other’s farms and restaurants to help with production. Clicking on resource utilities grants the farm owner a bonus % to their crop. Restaurant help is done in the form of temp requests.

Temping: This, for me, was the most confusing aspect of the game when I started. All cookers after a certain point have the option to host a temp. Temps are given by friends and shorten your cook time by 60%. On the other side, you can visit your friends’ restaurants and request temp jobs. Depending on the cooker you select, you will receive a payout for your time. The restaurant owner must approve your temp request before you can collect money.

Gold isn’t as free-flowing in this game and takes some work to build up. The prices of expanding your shop, purchasing new/more resource utilities and cookers skyrockets. Temps are an important part of your revenue stream.

Franchises: Create or join your own “guild” called a franchise. During the delivery period, members of your franchise and deliver goods that posted on your delivery board. Increase your franchise rank and gold/gem rewards by delivering as many goods as you can. You can only deliver items that you have cooked and have in-stock.

Final Thoughts

I played this game for two months straight, forsaking all other games. Though I always neglect social components in games, I enjoyed this one. I like the Twitter-style follow method and temping is a rewarding system. You can decorate your shop inside and out as well as your farm. The music is bright, cheerful, and well orchestrated. The art style is a clean anime style. Overall, it’s one of my favorite free phone games I have played this year.