Manage your own food truck selling crepes in Food Truck Pup by Game Start — a cute and addictive pixelated mobile game, featuring a Shiba Inu chef.
In Food Truck Pup, you are a Shiba Inu who runs a food truck selling crepes. You have to run the kitchen, collect ingredients and hand out flyers to promote your truck. As your truck becomes more successful, you can hire more staff (up to three per truck) to work for you. While working, your character and workers needs food, sleep and to wash.
The game has two currencies. Everytime you sell a crepe, you receive gold coins, which you can use to buy more furniture or clothing as well as hiring staff for your truck. You also receive bones as you complete milestones that can be used to hire staff, level up your character and your staff members and unlock coffee machines to sell coffee.
The app is totally free to play, and actions such as buying furniture and clothing can be sped up by watching short video adverts. Your Shiba Inu will also bring out presents that gift you additional coins for watching a 30-second advert. There are two mini games that you can play to get more gold coins and bones: the first is a ‘match 3’ game where you match three or more items in a row for gold coins, and the other you can receive gold coins and bones by digging them up from a 5×5 grid. In both you can increase your reward and cut your waiting time before playing again by watching a short video advert.
Initially while playing I found the instructions and controls very confusing — it’s not very intuitive. After closing the game and coming back to it I couldn’t remember how to find the menu to select between serving in the kitchen, handing out flyers and getting more ingredients. (You have to click on your Shiba Inu chef, by the way!) Other things such as giving your pup a bath or getting them to sleep is also not very intuitive — you have to pick them up and drag them. It also took me a long time (and a Google search) to figure out how to buy a truck in a new location.
Once I had the hang of the controls, however, I really enjoyed it and haven’t put it down. The graphics are in a pixelated style, and the characters are all very cute. I love that all the characters are so polite, too — when you hand future customers flyers each one says ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’ or ‘hey’ when they come to the counter to buy food, for example. When you have to watch an ad, your Shiba Inu says ‘thank you’ after you’ve watched it which is very charming.
The music is very relaxing and fun, and fits the mood of the game perfectly.
The game’s AI could also do with some improvements. Levelling up your staff costs an additional 50 bones each time. This allows your staff to do other tasks, such as handing out flyers, but it seems like it should also make them faster. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, and staff are incredibly slow at serving food. When I unlocked a new location, I was able to sell both banana and strawberry crepes — and my new member of staff started giving strawberry crepes to customers who had requested banana, and vice versa, which meant unhappy customers and was incredibly frustrating.
Your fellow doggie staff members take breaks to eat and sleep throughout the game. During these times, it can leave the kitchen empty, or no one to hand out flyers. I had my game set to have two characters handing out flyers and one working in the kitchen, and the staff handing out flyers would sometimes take breaks at the same time. I would only notice when there were suddenly no customers coming to the truck. It would be helpful to have icons on each of the actions so you can see where each member of staff is and know straight away if you need to help out elsewhere.
While there are some ads to support the creation of the game, I didn’t find these overbearing. You can pay a small fee (currently £2.89) to remove some of the ads (other than the video ads to shorten wait times) which feels very reasonable and it’s certainly worth paying if you play the game a lot!
You can also pay a small amount to unlock some new animals, such as pandas, koalas and polar bears.
Overall, this is a great mobile game. Once you have picked up the controls, it is a really fun and cute game — I didn’t want to put it down. I really enjoyed managing all the different aspects, and figuring out the best way to manage my team and different trucks. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a new mobile game to play!
Food Truck Pup is available on the Apple Store for iOS devices and on the Google Play Store for Android devices, and it’s free to play (with ads).
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