GAME: Good Pizza, Great Pizza by Tapblaze

GENRE: Cooking, simulation

PLATFORM: Android, iOS

The play store is flooded with cooking games, and many of them have similar gameplay — of serving orders fast. Good Pizza Great Pizza (GPGP) by Tapblaze has managed to stand out from this crowd by offering such a unique and an interesting gameplay that I am surprised I haven’t reviewed it yet.

In GPGP, you run a newly opened pizza joint with the dream of becoming the best pizzeria in town. And it’s not going to be easy with the town’s most famous pizza shop right across yours. But you must try and for that, you must take and make very specific orders. Throughout the day, customers come in one by one and describe — sometimes rather cryptically — the pizza they’d like to eat. Your job is to figure out that riddle of an order, and make the perfect pizza by picking exactly the right toppings, cheese, sauce and even the number of slices to cut the pizza into.

Doing all of this fast and right gets you extra tips, but each ingredient costs you money. Would you sell an extra-loaded pizza to make the customer happy, or would you skimp on the toppings and increase your profit margins? The strategy is to find just the right balance, and the freedom to decide how you want to make your pizza makes this one different from other cooking games.

You play through a day-night cycle, where the start of each day opens your shop for customers, and at night, you tally up the day’s profits and losses. With the money you earn, you can buy new equipment and ingredients to make a greater variety of pizzas. Each in-game day is five minutes long and you can choose when to start the next day. Thus this game won’t suck in your time unwittingly. Despite being free-to-play, GPGP doesn’t make you grind at all to proceed, and the few optional ads feel like desirable reward opportunities.

While running your shop and interacting with customers, you come to know more about this cartoony world of pizzas and its eccentric characters. Each customer is unique; most of them have their own personality and story. And they can order the whackiest pizzas you can imagine! Like a customer who once ordered a pizza “with nothing on it”. Yeah, just the crust! But who am I to judge?

There are a lot of hilarious details added into this world to make it comic and believable. There’s an entire news channel called Pizza News Network dedicated to news about, well, pizzas. Through this and much more, an interesting yet light-hearted story unfolds that keeps you engaged.

VERDICT: Good Pizza Great Pizza is not just good, it’s great! The gameplay is unique for a cooking game, focusing on dealing with customers and making pizzas like an actual pizza chef rather than just serving orders fast. The characters, story and world-building are detailed yet light-hearted, making playing it every day a delight. I rate it nine out of 10.