PC Review: Stand O’ Food 3

It’s always hard to review a food themed time management game. You can’t help but get hungry as you play it. While I don’t recommend playing Stand O’ Food 3 on an empty stomach or while on a diet, I do recommend this game to all the time mangement game fans out there. Stand O’ Food 3 continues a polished franchise that hopefully lives on forever.

At first glance, SOF3 looks and plays very much like its predecessors. You play as Ron the emerging burger chain mogul aspiring to take over the whole world one burger franchise at a time. Each round consists of you putting together elements of burger materials - lower bun, beef patty, cheese, tomato, top bun, etc. - to fill the order of oncoming patrons. They come out of these seemingly endless magic conveyor belts and it’s your job to stack them in the correct order while adding the right sauces. Like any time management game, you need to do this quickly and efficiently before the customers get angry.

In SOF3, it’s not just about burgers. You also manage cake restaurants and lasagna restaurants. These restaurants are essentially the same thing as the burger joints with the materials looking different. While I do give credit to developers, G5 Entertainment, for trying to change things up, the gameplay is essentially the same.

The additions that did work for me were the mini-games. In addition to stacking pieces of burger together, you also get new gameplay with things like, “organize the burger materials into the right boxes” and “the burgers are pre-made, just serve them really fast.” (Yeah, I don’t really know the names of these mini-games.) Overall, this was a nice change of pace from the monotony of stacking burgers together.

Another change in SOF3 is that you have to serve sides in addition the main burger meals - things like fries, soft drinks, ice cream and coffee. I didn’t particularly like how this was implemented. Every customer that comes in, first orders a side before they reach the burger receiving area. All you need to do to fulfill a side order request is click on the fries machine once and your character automatically pops some fries out of the machine and takes it to the customer. There’s nothing challenging about that nor do I feel it adds much depth. It would be more interesting if I had to prepare the fries, wait for it to cook, salt it, put it in a container, and give it to the customer.

Since SOF3 builds upon the previous two versions, there wasn’t much tweaking needed to the user interface. Like I said before, this is a very polished franchise. They did add one nice tweak, which was to show you the sauce needed for each dish right next to the order. It was nightmare trying to remember which sauce pattern goes with which burger in the previous installments.

Other things I liked in the game was the merging of storylines between the Stand O’ Food franchise and the Super Market Mania franchise, both developed by G5 Entertainment. In fact, all the customers in SOF3 are taken from character models used in Super Market Mania. Sure it may seem cheap that they’re recycling assets, but I don’t really have an issue with it.

Other things I kind of dislike was the removal of those special burger wrappers that allows for un-ordered burger parts. Towards the later stages, a burger could take 10-14 different materials to build and sometimes you get stuck because one item is all the way in the back. The wrapper allows you to put the burger in any kind of order which is handy for this kind of situation. Also, the ending of the game just get really tedious. It was more of the same but larger burgers and angrier customers. I was hoping there would be a different gameplay element than what you’ve done already for the 50+ time like different mini-games - perhaps a burger building duel with your arch burger nemesis. I also think SOF3 could use more upgrades. Even before I reached the last of six sections in the game, I already maxed out all my upgrades and didn’t have anything to spend my money on.

Overall my nitpicks are minor and the SOF3 franchise continues as a solid continuation of a fun time management franchise. I think they played it safe with the changes and should they work on a #4 in the franchise, I would like to see more drastic changes.