It’s been a while since I played one of these little casual games, but after being away for a few months, I returned to find a bunch of new things for me to try out at Playfirst. One of the games that caught my attention was Teddy Tavern.
The description made it sound similar to Diner Dash, and in a way it is, in the sense that you have to serve your customers. But at the same time, it’s very different, since it’s Teddy that has to prepare the food himself.
As the story goes, Teddy wants to enter a Culinary Competition to become a Master Chef. But to get there, he has to go through a series of trials first.
Basically, the levels can be separated into the ground floor – the kitchen – and upper floors – the seating area. Teddy runs around at the bottom, back and forth, by simply moving the mouse in the direction you want to go. The recipes for the dishes you can make are in Today’s Menu, a bar at the bottom of the screen. Making something is as simple as clicking the ingredients. To serve the dish to a customer, you stand below him and toss the food up with a simple click. To clean the tables, you pick up a sponge and toss it in the direction of the table that needs cleaning.
Simple, isn’t it? Here’s the twist: customers ask for different meals, and many won’t be content with just one meal. So as you imagine, the more recipes you have available at the bottom, the more complicated it gets. The easy solution? At the end of each level, upgrade anything except the recipes.
You can chain-serve and chain-clean, since Teddy can pick up up to five items at once. But chains don’t always work as expected, because tables aren’t close enough for items to bounce on to the others. So when chaining, you have to think for a quick second to find out where to position Teddy to toss everything up. Though it’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t work regardless of what table you throw it to, because they all light up for the chain anyway, but then it just doesn’t happen.
Serving your customers successfully drops you coins. You must run Teddy into them to pick them up. Sometimes, birds will fly by as well. You can hit them with a dish or a sponge to get extra money. And one of the unlockables also drops you tokens now and again. Pay attention to the coins that drop, some of them have interesting and useful effects, such as giving you a stack of “wildcards”. I call them wildcards because you can use them to either serve someone or clean a table.
As for other upgrades, they can either be the cat on the roof, a new recipe, something to improve your restaurant (decorations, new floor, an entertainer) and make your customers happier and more patient.
Another handy feature is the little hut on the bottom right. Here, you can pick up a ready-made dish of the same kind of the last you’ve created. Makes it quicker to serve when there are many of the same order, but if you go back and do another recipe, then the meal will change.
Graphically, the presentation of the story is done like a comic book. We’ve seen it in Diner Dash, Cake Mania and Plantasia, for example. The artwork is nicely done, in both the comic and the backgrounds, but I think there should have been different animations for the customers.
While the sound effects aren’t too spectacular, the music is great and it ties in with the background environments of each level. Just wait until you hear the soothing oriental tune in the Chinese restaurant, it almost makes you forget about the customers’ rush.
If you like cute teddy bears, aspire to run your own restaurant and this sounds like a fun little pass-time to you, you might want to check out the trial and experience being in Teddy’s shoes for an hour.