Visually pleasing remake with some unfortunate platforming problems.
Burgertime's concept was cute and novel: Take Donkey Kong's platforming and climbing mechanics and add the need to stack food together to make burgers. The 1982 original Burgertime made what could have easily been a DK knock-off into a very entertaining, if not difficult, platformer with a inventive twist that differentiated itself from its predecessor.
The remake, however, takes cues from games like Klonoa and Pandemonium!, implementing a 2-1/2D perspective in order to keep its more stringent fundamentals, while giving the world more vibrance and a bigger feel. The result makes for an entertaining, if not underwhelming aesthetic. The levels feature a lot of primary colors that burst with the overall food motif of the game.
Where the 2-1/2D becomes a hinderance, especially in the later levels, is when dodging enemies or reaching difficult platforms. Levels in the game are more circular in nature, which means there is a definitive end to the levels. This leads to problems anticipating how far an enemy is from your character. Too often, it feels like an enemy is a reasonable distance away, only to find that the minute you move forward, it just hit you.
This becomes a bigger problem when jumping from side to side becomes more demanding. Distance between objects become hard to discern, which causes a lot of unnecessary deaths by falling spikes (or in more annoying stages, spikes that require ultra-precise timing to not move a single pixel to not get hit). It's a shame because the actual layout seems good, but the distortion becomes an unnecessary annoyance.
In fact, the actual jumping doesn't feel entirely controllable. Too often, again in later stages, it feels like jumps are too impossible to make, yet somehow, the game has a platform that you can't see and let's you through. Often times, however, there are jumps that feel like it should make it, only for some unknown reason, you miss the jump, causing an unnecessary death. Even worse than that, sometimes your character gets caught in the geometry of the level, only for the game to then release you from the level...into a bed of spikes, of course.
This leads to a lot of later levels using techniques that don't feel like skillful techniques that are rewarding to complete a level. Often times, it feels like cheating a level will get you to finish. Double jumping while you technically can't double-jump, jumping on platforms that don't exist in plain sight, relying on the shotty hit detection to take care of an enemy and using power-ups that have inconsistent properties and power seem more like band-aids to help you finish the game and mask the problems this game has.
Or, depending on how you look at it, you can call it a "throwback" of sorts of old-school arcade gaming. If you think that way, Burgertime World Tour is definitely worth a $10 purchase to try out. That said, the original is far better than this remake, and if you are simply looking for a good, fun and possibly challenging platforming game, you may want to wait until the price drops...or avoid it all together.
Reviewer's Score: 5/10
Old-School Enthusiast?: +1 point
Get it for $5?: Add .5 points