Pizza Maker

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Pizza Maker is an Arcade-style game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024 where players are given orders in a pizzeria and must then construct, bake, and slice the pizza for the customer within a limited amount of time. This game’s concept, its core gameplay, and its cartoony hand-drawn art style, definitely seem reminiscent of Good Pizza, Great Pizza, though unfortunately for Pizza Maker that’s as far as the comparisons go.

Starting with the presentation, this game’s cartoony 2D visuals are indeed appealing, but it’s not always clear what ingredients are supposed to be. Is that pink stuff bacon? Red onion? Ham? Chicken? Nothing is labeled, even when you move the cursor over it, so you just have to guess and hope for the best.

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned sound yet… there is none. Absolutely no music or sound effects at all. You will be making pizza in eerie silence.

When we look at the gameplay, players are provided no instruction at all, or even an indication what buttons do. You just have to muddle through it. Apparently the A button is used to grab things using your on-screen hand cursor and to place it on the pizza dough, while the B button opens the hand, which you’ll need to do to grab the pizza and put it in the oven. Wait until its fully-cooked and you can bring it over to the counter to slice it, then to the box to serve it to the customer.

You’re not really given a clear indication how well you did. You’re given money for your efforts but it’s not clear how that correlates with your performance, nor are you told where you went wrong, or if you even went wrong at all. You can spend earned money on passive upgrades, but otherwise it’s off to the next customer, with no fanfare or even recognition of the task completed.

This underwhelming end to the game loop would be depressing enough as-is, but it’s here where we need to talk about how utterly broken this game is. The second customer says… nothing. Which is followed by you having to repeat the first customer’s order. Is this an indication that you failed? Well… no, apparently, it’s just the game seemingly messing up. Complete this order again and you’ll move on to the next customer. Oh, and if you thought you messed up and tried to restart, you’ll be back at the first customer, with the exact same order, followed by the second customer, with the exact same lack of communication and repeat of the same order.

At one point, the game brought the pizza cutter to the customer service screen and wouldn’t let me bring it back to the counter, forever keeping me from cutting pizza again. This happened because, when moving the pizza over, it scrolls the screen past the counter and to the box, making it easy to accidentally place it in the box. By the time I grabbed the cutter, the game was already moving along to the next section, me with pizza cutter in hand.

In the end, maybe you think you’re getting a good deal with Pizza Maker’s “$5 but frequently lowered to $2” budget price, but that price is reflected in the absolutely shoddy workmanship of this game. It’s an absolute mess that borders on unplayable, and even though it’s visually-appealing, this appeal is a facade that hides a broken, incomplete game. I complained that Good Pizza, Great Pizza’s price was $10 when the mobile game was free-to-play, but even that $10 price tag is a steal compared to the absolute undercooked slop of Pizza Maker. Leave this one in the oven, it’s not ready for consumption.

tl;dr – Pizza Maker is an Arcade-style game where you custom-make Pizzas for customers, but this is an absolute shambles of a game that’s incomplete, buggy, and poorly-designed. This undercooked slop is far beyond unpalatable, and the chef responsible needs to be reported to the health inspector.

Grade: F

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