GAMETECH: Too much on plate for Gordon Ramsey Dash

IN Gordon Ramsey Dash, the only thing that gets fried is your brain. 

Ramsey Dash is a free-to-play mobile game that makes you the star of a fictional reality TV show, Rising Stars Chef, in which celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey cajoles you from the sidelines. The goal is to prepare and serve food to a steady stream of customers, reacting to their different orders by organising your preparation to match. Fun is off the menu.

Initially, these orders are quite straightforward and (whisper it) even enjoyable to prepare. So when a customer wants a burger, you place the patty on a grill, wait for it to cook, then put it on a bun and serve. Or when they want a turkey sandwich and a drink, you pick up the coke en route to the turkey, then head to the bread to combine with the turkey, and voila – customer served. You do all this by simply tapping on the required stations, while a cartoon avatar speeds around the kitchen for you, eventually stopping at the customer to serve.

As you serve each customer, they amount they pay will depend on the service received. If you serve them on time, they will pay top coin. If you serve all customers perfectly during the time limit (usually around 2 minutes) then you’ll get three gold stars and the best rewards.

Unfortunately, Ramsey Dash doesn’t stop at plain burgers and turkey sandwiches — how could it? It isn’t long before customers are ordering fries, onion rings, ice-creams, turkey in lettuce wraps, turkey BLTs, burgers with toppings, all of which are reliant on different kitchen stations to complete, each one requiring preparation time. With only two hands to carry food around the kitchen, your avatar needs to visit the stations in the right order to maximise speed and efficiency of service. For example, if someone wants fries, you need to visit the potato station, then the chopping station, then the frying station, but that leaves extra time while you wait for the fries to cook – which means you must spend the intervening time preparing another order. While the fries are in the oil, you’d better prepare that turkey BLT. And while the turkey BLT is being prepped, you’d better line up the burger. And while the burger is being made… well, let’s just say your goose is being cooked too.

You can upgrade your kitchen to help out with the orders, so preparation time is cut down and you can cook and store more food at each station, but these upgrades cost coins or gold. As usual with free-to-play games, those coins and gold are much easier to buy with a credit card than to earn in the game.

Ramsey Dash does have some great things going for it. The presence of Ramsey’s character and voice adds some fun impetus to the game and it’s sadly gratifying to hear him praise your work as ‘f***ing amazing’ when you get three stars.

The graphics and overall presentation are really pleasant and, crucially, the controls respond well to your input. It’s a well-designed and well-constructed game.

Despite that, it suffers from the same old free-to-play problem. At its heart, Ramsey Dash becomes inherently stressful if you don’t pay for the upgrades. It’s like being told there is free food in a five-star restaurant, only to be served a paltry starter and then charged €500 for the main course. If you’ve an appetite for good gaming, steer well clear of games like this.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

It’s hard to judge whether there’s an appetite for an Uncharted movie, but Sony continues to push forward regardless. Filming was originally supposed to start in 2015, but the project went through a series of different writers and directors before receding to the shadows. Now, Bad Boys 3 director and writer Joe Carnahan has been given script-writing duties, though he won’t be directing the project.

“In a perfect world I would love to do both, but right now, I’m only on board to write the script,” he said. “Plus, the property itself is so popular that it was hard to turn down an opportunity to work on it.” We’re not sure if a cinematic adaptation is the right move for this series, especially after the brilliant Uncharted 4. Still, like a customer in Ramsey Dash, we’re always hungry for more.