BurgerTime World Tour Review

**Smore ninja** · December 11th, 2011

Need something to help you decide what to eat for lunch? BurgerTime World Tour can help you by giving you a nice craving for burgers with its quirky platforming adventure. This attempt to bring the 1982 classic Coin-op arcade game to the modern gaming scene follows Pepper Pete. Taking on several rivals around the world, BurgerTime World Tour has some great ideas even though there are several oddities that do hamper the enjoyment of this title.

The really strange thing about BurgerTime World Tour is that it makes some design choices that I really enjoy. The round shaped, rotating maps are fun and a nice new way for level design. The style of the game is also bright and vibrant in an appealing way. All of this pairs really well with the ability to use Xbox Avatars as your playable character. The Avatars definitely fit in with the aesthetic of the game, even more so than Pepper Pete. The enemies look sinister in an old cartoon kind of way, while some of the hazards feel like they were provided by Wile E. Coyote. With the circular design it is assumed that you can look into the background to find hazards that you will encounter. While all of these style choices are great, it doesn’t save the game from mediocre gameplay.

The controls for BurgerTime World Tour are rather simple. It uses standard movement controls; use the left stick to run and A to jump, while B is used for power-ups and X to throw pepper. The power ups are varied and mostly easy to figure out when used for the first time. One of the more fun power-ups is the rockets, which fly you up pretty high. There are a small handful of levels that are based on using the rockets, which are a lot of fun and enjoyable. The rest of the levels have some fun platforming challenges, but generally the levels are bland to play. With that being said, while I previously mentioned that I have enjoyed the circular level design for its style, it can make focusing on the foreground a bit more difficult due to the easily distracting background. Hit detection seems to be a huge issue as well. Several times I’ve seen my character touch a ladder and as such I would go up on my thumbstick and would find myself falling instead of climbing. There has also been the issue where you can’t seem to jump off ladders, but the game would think otherwise. Jumping in general feels very odd and with the object of the game being to use your jumping skills to avoid hazards and traps, it just isn’t a winning recipe. Because you have so much control over your movement, it makes the jumping feel strange. It’s basically like running, except you are moving vertically as well as horizontally, which feels really awkward. This is a real shame since the general gameplay concept of running over the ingredients to have them fall down is rather solid and every chapter of the game has a boss battle that follows some good methods to make them challenging.

In the end, BurgerTime World Tour is a game that does some things right, but is too bogged with what is essentially just a lack of polish. The visual style is good but the vital jumping is not, which is a shame because I was personally looking forward to this game and was very happy to be able to use my avatar.

Overall Rating:
6/10