Delicious World

This restaurant management game scales its challenge over each round, but the lack of instruction and heavy push for purchasing currency to keep playing puts a bad taste in gamer's mouths. Delicious World provides new goals in each level, such as a certain amount of dishes to serve or coins to earn. Some involve additional challenges, such as a time limit to serve a certain amount of people. Customers can get tired of waiting and leave, so players need to watch the hearts that appear next to them to gauge who to serve next. Giving a customer part of an order helps, but you earn more for providing full orders all at once, so preparing food items in advance can be key.

There are some puzzling design choices, like having to repeatedly click behind the main character in her kitchen to successfully put a lobster on the grill. Players are told to beat levels to earn mittens, which appear to be oven mitts, but aren't called that -- and the romance-based storyline doesn't really add much to the experience. The conversations don't further the plot much, and while the characters don't actually say any dialogue out loud, they frequently grunt, sigh, and make other noises during conversations, which can be distracting. At least the rounds escalate in complexity and speed at a good pace. New elements are introduced gradually, so you shouldn't feel too overwhelmed in the early part of the game, but there are items to help if you're overwhelmed. You can upgrade equipment with coins earned to produce things faster, and use Booster items, bought with diamonds, which provide advantages like keeping food from burning on the grill. But it's hard to fund Boosters for long based just on what you've earned, which adds pressure to purchase in-app currency packages to continue playing. In its free, early stages, Delicious World is a lot of fun. But unless you can successfully manage to beat each round, you'll have to eventually spend some cash -- or spend some time waiting around to play.