Some games I played in 2024: Fast Food Rampage
So, uh, playing Maiden Cops might have encouraged me to pick up other games on Steam for the sole purpose of ripping their sprites, whether I enjoyed them or not. I played Fast Food Rampage for less than twenty minutes and my verdict was “criminally unsatisfying.”
I wasn’t aware of its history at the time, but apparently the roots of this game began in an animation for the YouTube channel Mashed, a parody of Hatred — god, remember that? The same self-serious monologue about the inferiority of others, only it’s delivered by a fast food mascot bemoaning the rising popularity of health foods as he weaponises the McDonalds menu to make people explode from overeating.
Considering the bulk of its comments are along the lines of “I would play this if it were a game,” it’s clear it made a splash on people, for its colourful pixel animation if nothing else. Nineteen months later, Fast Food Rampage hits mobile markets and looks just like the animation, letting you recreate its caloric carnage nearly to a T!
It’s a wave-based top-down twin-stick arena shooter, which basically mean you walk around a confined area and shoot dudes. You’ve got a burger bazooka and milkshake molotovs, and racking up combo kills will increase the likelihood of limited-time weapon drops: a gatling gun that shoots french fries, a soda jetpack that melts people, an explosive chicken launcher, a pie airstrike… and a clown car to just run over people with. After you clear a certain number of waves you fight a giant tomato monster. And that’s your gameplay loop!
My takeaway from playing the game is… it really, really makes me miss just how accessible Flash games were. I understand the internet’s probably better off with embeds you activate manually rather than every Flash asset fighting for resources and slowing your computer to a crawl… but it also meant you could go to Newgrounds (or Miniclip, or Albino Black Sheep, or Kill Frog, or wherever one perused at the time), click on a game, and away you go.
Nowadays any time an internet browser asks to load an embedded Unity or HTML5 game, it’s basically asking if I want a crummy experience that could’ve just been a downloaded executable. And as much as I’d like to explore mobile platforms more, downloading a hundred-meg app and wading through introductory bullshit on every game is the quickest way to kill my enthusiasm, even before they start acting like salesmen looking to upsell me.
My point is, if this were a game published on Newgrounds fifteen or so years ago, it’d be considered a cute bit of nonsense. McDonalds memes were all the rage back then too, so it’d almost be timely! Instead because it’s a mobile game and we need to rent-seek however we can to stay alive, the game makes itself crummier to incentivise you putting money into it.
You get in-game currency by killing enemies, with bigger payouts for combos, beating bosses, or clearing challenges (“survive to wave 6,” “explode 12 rats,” “throw 8 milkshakes,” stuff like that). Said currency is spent on unlocking new stages, upgrading your gun, buying costumes to get buffs and passive perks, and even buying milkshake grenades — their stock isn’t replenished at the start of each run.
I’d get 1500 coins per run on average, which is good enough to unlock the stages, but leaves you wanting if want to beef up your mime. Your default burger bazooka is adequate in the first couple of waves, but enemies quickly become burger sponges that take multiple shots before going down.
Combine that with your slow movement speed and how coins vanish so quickly after appearing, you probably want a few perks to have an optimum experience. Why, you can earn lots of coins instantly with a payment as low as $1 or as high as…!
Except the Steam version doesn’t remedy this. You pay money to buy the game, but it doesn’t adjust any of the design embedded in its free-to-play days. You still earn a pittance from each enemy defeated, upgrades still cost a bundle… it remains a grind-fest, only now I paid for the privilege instead of thinking I was fighting the system.
‘Cause that’s the thing with free-to-play games — it’s gotta fleece you somehow, and to facilitate the player spending money on it, they have to make it a little bit shitty on purpose. Hence, your upgrade system! You could pay now to reap its benefits… but there’s an incentive to get good to earn that dough without forking over the real stuff. A meta element where you think you’re beating the system; I paid nothing, so every achievement feels like a penny saved!
But when you pay for the game, there’s not quite the same drive. Oh, I paid £3 for a twin-stick shooter that’s slow and it sucks. And I gotta put multiple hours in before it gets marginally less bad, you say?
The levels are very simple, and there’s only four enemy types, not counting the boss who’s largely fought solo. Despite the five levels, they’re literally just a change of scenery; you can’t enter the houses in the suburbs, you can’t raid the shops or ride the escalator in the mall, and you can’t even interact with the playground in the park. There’s nothing to interact with!
The original Mashed animation had a gag where a kid on a seesaw launches their friend into orbit after being bloated with burgers. It’s the one gag that doesn’t rely on bloody explosive murder, but it’s also a glimpse of something that could’ve been more interactive.
It’s a game that hinges on its comedic ultraviolence, fattening people ’til they explode with silly food-themed weaponry… yet it also feels a little like frivolous set dressing? Shooting enemies will slow them down and eventually immobilise them, in which state they’ll pop on their own if you don’t shoot them, denying you the combo bonus or item drops, I guess.
I just feel like it’s missing a trick by not doing more with that; rolling immobilised baddies to crush other foes, or even just as meat shields, be it to your benefit or detriment. Something, anything to make the gimmick more interactive than just a visual gag to get people in the door!
It’s an arena shooter, being confined to a small area with endless enemies flooding in is kind of its thing. You are not going to see new places or encounter new challenges. It hinges entirely on the player wanting to get better, buy new upgrades, and see how much better they get with said upgrades.
It’s an economic way to design a game, but it also hinges entirely on how much mileage a player gets out of such a thing. I like me a good score attack game, but Fast Food Rampage really does show all the content it has in its first couple of minutes, and doesn’t have much to make you stick with it over other games.
This game strikes the same disappointment in me as Curses ‘n’ Chaos; both games with lovely pixel art and a solid foundation, let down by the fact that… well, you really see all the game has to offer in the first couple of minutes. There aren’t that many ways of engaging with enemies, and despite all the colourful locales, none of them meaningfully change anything. This one’s a square, this one’s a rectangle, this one has fences…!
It’s the dichotomy of game design: by making an arena shooter you don’t need to produce as many assets, and can pad out the playtime by making the player grind for upgrades — it’s cost effective and incentivises income! But I feel by putting that extra time and money into producing a shorter but more ‘structured’ experience, a linear shooter with intent and design to its stages and setpieces, it’d make a stronger impression…
… but I understand it’s easy for me to say that. In the time it takes to design just one level of a Shock Troopers-like, you could finish a whole game simply by leaving its challenges, enemy layouts and item drops up to random generation. Why make multiple new bosses or enemies when you can just crank up their health with every wave?
To its credit, it does present an adequate challenge and sense of satisfaction once the combos get going; the mini-fry gun is particular fun to use, and outrunning your assailants by fattening them from afar is a treat. The graphics are charming, full of personality and fluid animation; the limited detail and twiggy limbs might seem generic, but they really go above and beyond in making them expressive and dynamic.
Animated trailers were made for its mobile and Steam launches; I guess by that point Hatred‘s fifteen minutes of fame had subsided, so it leans more on poking fun at hipsters and the inherent wackiness of a mime gone mad. The second trailer adds a self-deprecating jab: “that’s right, everyone loves a mobile game that ends up on Steam!”
It’s a drag because, like Maiden Cops, I feel this should be a game I’m into. The Steam release could’ve been an opportunity to flesh out the game (pun intended only if you think it was worth it), to sink a little more budget into a version that’s hopefully guaranteed more longevity among customers who actually buy things!
Though I understand me gurning “if only they did this, it could’ve been great!” does not account for the time, cost, and effort involved in such things. The animation already goes harder than it needs to on the assets it has already; asking for more enemy types almost feels cruel. Still, I’d love it if game devs took commissions from nobodies. Inti-Creates, get on the horn. I’ve got ideas that are mostly an excuse to make your artists stop drawing anime boilerplate.
(Bonus trivia: unless it was something they removed in later updates, the first trailer features beardless civilians in its gameplay footage, while the playable game just uses palette swaps of its beardies; there’s no trace of them in the graphics data as far as I can tell. Be the first to add that to The Cutting Room Floor Wiki!)
