Fast Food Panic Review

Blame it on Cooking Mama. Blame it on casual gaming. Blame it on America’s insatiable desire to eat food. Whatever the reason, cooking games are now a fact of life on the Nintendo DS and Wii. Fast Food Panic is one of those games. It doesn’t do things terribly different. Depending on if you like this type of game or hate it, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Have you gotten hungry yet?

You can say that Fast Food Panic is a mix between Cooking Mama and Diner Dash. Aside from cooking various recipes, you will also have to welcome guests that enter your restaurant, take their orders, serve them and clean up after them. You’ll even have to shoo away pesky rodents that scurry across the floor. As I said, if you like these types of games, you will probably enjoy Fast Food Panic. It does not stray too far from the beaten path.

The cooking mechanics are straightforward. Just follow the directions on the screen. Arrows tell you what you need to do. You do everything from rolling pizza dough, chopping onion, stirring food, gathering rice for sushi, tenderizing meat and tossing pasta. There are some mini-games, such as sorting dirty dishes and working the calculator. Most of the food needs to be cooked either in the stove or on the oven. A bar indicates how well done each item is and you can work on other foods while they cook.

This game uses a lot of bars. A bar at the bottom of the screen tells you how satisfied your guests are. Once you fill up the bar, you complete the level. Another bar directly below this tells you how much time you have left. Once it fills up, you are also done, but have lost for not doing it within the time frame. The bottom screen has buttons on the side to welcome guests, scare away rodents, help your assistant with tasks and clean up dishes.

As fun as some casual games can be, such as Scribblenauts, I really didn’t get into Fast Food Panic all that much. It’s a game that feels more like doing chores than having fun. Then again, there are plenty of people that like Cooking Mama and Diner Dash type games. This melds those two together for a mix that is quite boring and unsatisfying. If you insist on playing Fast Food Panic anyway, I would recommend the Nintendo DS version.