No Ceiling Games, the developers of Fast Food Simulator are a new games development studio that promises that their love for games and their relentless desire to ‘push the boundaries of interactive entertainment’ which will lead to the studio crafting experiences that resonate, entertain and inspire, whether exploring vast open worlds or unravelling intricate puzzles. Put simply their mission is to create moments that stay with you forever. Do No Ceiling Games claims hold up? We tried out their first release, Fast Food Simulator to find out.

Have you ever come home from your job at a fast food restaurant and wanted to play a video game where you run your own fast food restaurant? I can’t say that I have but then again, I have never had a job at fast food establishment, I thought I was way too cool for that and spent all my teenage years tagging trains, skateboarding and chasing girls instead, that being said, I am a huge lover of sim type games and all the busy work that makes up their gameplay loop, so I was very keen to jump into the game.

As you jump into the game and your new job running your restaurant you get to customise your establishments name and the sign out the front and if you use one of the employee lockers you can also change the appearance of your in game character, beyond that there currently isn’t any more customisation available, so unfortunately you can’t change the restaurants décor around to your liking which is a bit of a disappointment. You begin your day with a quick tutorial teaching you how to order ingredients for the food you need to prepare for your hungry customers through the stores computer and how to cook basic food items but after that you are basically left on your own, except for a few post it notes scattered about the kitchen area that have some quick video tutorials for you if you get stuck. After ordering your ingredients for the day you need to meet the delivery truck and unpack it and make sure you store the ingredients in the correct places, meat in the fridge for instance, and set up the store for the start of your burger flipping day.

Once you open the store the customers will quickly start rolling in and placing orders, these orders will be placed on various screens around the kitchen which allows you to see what the customer wants whether you are at the deep fryer, the grill or the burger construction station. At the start you don’t really have access to anything other than a basic burger consisting of a bun and a meat patty which though not realistic is good for gameplay as it basically lets you ease into the game for the first couple of days running your restaurant. You level up your establishments reputation and popularity by serving customers the correct orders and this then unlocks more ingredients for you to play around with such as ketchup, lettuce, french fries, soft drinks, coffee, chicken nuggets amongst others as well as unlocking other areas of the restaurant such as the drive through.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the different combinations of orders if you are playing solo to help with this you can hire staff to take orders and to pick up customers money and clean up their food trays once they are finished eating, I found hiring staff pretty useless though as the front counter is pretty easy to run by yourself as you only need to click on the customer to take their order, and you can collect all of the customers money and trays at the end of the day when the restaurant is closed, it would be more helpful if you could hire staff to man the grill or the deep fryer as these are easily the most time intensive jobs. If you are playing single player though a simple tip for you is to prepare and cook some of the meat patties in the morning before you open up to customers as it appears that customers don’t really care if you serve them a cold burger. The gameplay loop here is really simple, yet also satisfying, as it is with most of the game in this genre, it is a great game to just jump into for an hour or two and relax. Multiplayer is where Fast Food Simulator truly shines though and the chaos that ensues when you jump into a game with 5 other friends or strangers can quickly lead to hilarity, especially with the games in built voice chat.

Fast Food Simulator is a well put together game, it runs very smoothly and looks great, and there is a solid couple of hours fun here if playing alone, several more if playing with friends. On the downside the game is pretty bare bones even for an early access title and I couldn’t find a roadmap for the game that shows what the developers plan to add in the future, which makes it really hard to currently recommend for purchase at its current price. There is a solid base here and so much opportunity to add further features into the game such as restaurant customisation, jobs such as cleaning the kitchen and toilets, creating your own burger recipes and many others, I recommend checking back in on the game when a roadmap becomes available or in a few months to see what the developers have added to the game before making a purchase.

The game is available in Early Access now via Steam, you can follow along with the developers here.