In a world without a Bob’s Burgers game on the Nintendo eShop comes the next best thing — Good Pizza, Great Pizza. Much like the show’s main character, the player is a restaurant proprietor that is struggling to launch a new business. While Bob has Jimmy Pesto to serve as a rival, the player must outdo a rival of their own, and it is a pizzeria across the street from your location known as Alicante’s. At the start, the owner of Alicante’s will visit your shop and place the first order – this serves as a tutorial moment to teach you the basics of prep, baking, slicing, and boxing the pizza for delivery.
Good Pizza, Great Pizza’s presentation is of a simple style – you open around lunch and close in the early evening. Over the course of the day, you’ll have customers enter the establishment and place orders. Initially, you won’t handle many orders in the first few in-game days as the countdown timer moves quickly and the pizza oven is slow, thus limited your output potential. Nonetheless, the goal is to take as many orders as possible and to keep customer satisfaction high by churning out quality pizza in a time-efficient manner.
This is where the fun begins.
Now, anyone that has worked in the retail or food service industry will know that customers don’t know what they want and that follow up questions often lead to less than helpful results. Good Pizza, Great Pizza delivers a comical take on the clueless customer experience by having patrons order peculiar pizzas like a pepperoni pizza without pepperoni or a pizza without sauce and cheese. As the sole employee of the establishment, you have two options: make what they say and risk getting is wrong, thus issuing a refund, or ask for clarification and anger the customer and lower their customer satisfaction level. Same as in real life.
Making pizza is fun but also challenging. Crafting an efficient system to speed up the pizza-making process will become pivotal as it’ll increase your production numbers and daily profits. Pizza creation requires a few steps: rolling out the dough, applying the sauce, adding the requested toppings, baking, and then slicing into the requested number of pieces. It’s simple, but each component comes with its own set of challenges. Thankfully, the game’s controls are not one of the challenges. Good Pizza, Great Pizza uses a simple control style: the right Joycon analog stick selects dough and pizza ingredients, the left Joycon to spread sauce, place toppings, and to slice the pizza, and the R-button to transfer the pizza to the oven and then from oven to box.
Where the difficulty stems is from your handling of customers and efficiency to craft their orders. One strategy I found helpful is to prepare your dough in advance. I would set a couple of doughs on the preparation table; slather one with sauce and cheese, while the other remained naked of toppings. This granted a sense of flexibility in how I approached orders. If a customer wanted a sauceless pizza, I was ready. If a customer wanted a cheese pizza, it was prepared for immediate baking, consequently leading to a happier customer.
The difficulty ramps up as you offer your customers more complex pies. Initially, you will start with the basic toppings: sauce, cheese, and pepperoni. Over time, you will add sausage, mushrooms, olives, and other flavorful foods to your stock. The more ingredients you offer, the more intricate orders will become. Customers will request pizzas made up of fractions of select ingredients – such as half mushroom and half olive. If an order becomes too complex to recall from memory, you can quickly access the order for a refresher, though the trade-off is wasted time; but wasted time is better than issuing a refund for an incorrect order.
A refund here and there may not seem like much of a concern, but each refund given strips away from your daily revenue. Lower revenue means fewer upgrades, menu expansion, and fun restaurant additions for you to buy. A major focus of the game is balancing how you spend your money. Want more customers? Add tables. Want to make pizza fast? Upgrade your oven. There are numerous types of upgrades, many of which will directly impact the flow of your day to day operations. Upgrades range from assisting you with preparing pizza, baking the pizza, and keeping customers satisfied, thus leading to return customers. Like any business, consistency is of key importance, and Good Pizza, Great Pizza puts that philosophy to the test.
Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a blend of restaurant simulation with a touch of puzzle gameplay. You need to operate your pizzeria like a business and make it attractive to customers; all while finding the balance of efficient pizza making to keep the customer base happy. It’s an addicting game with a simple premise, but you’ll feel compelled to improve your restaurant and increase your daily income. That’s the hook. You know you can do better and achieving greater success is just a day away.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by PM Studios
