Burrito Bison belongs to a genre so freshly-minted that, as far as I’m aware, it’s yet to be formally named. You could call it a How Far game for the time being – a little like Canabalt, and a lot like PopCap’s hick Facebook glory, Pig Up!
On Twitter earlier this week, a friend of mine described Burrito as "pretty much the perfect lunchbreak game", and he’s not wrong. It’s certainly straightforward enough. You launch your bison into the air, and then occasionally step in to manage his flight as he bounces over an unending queue of gummy bears, collecting money and slowly powering up a special move as he goes. The whole thing’s pleasantly slight, and there isn’t a great deal of room for discussion – so let’s just take a very quick look at a few of the things that ensure such a simple game works so well.
Character
Bison are not a particularly attractive species, and Burrito doesn’t varnish the truth. Rather than turning its hero into a cheap anthropomorphised cutie, it exaggerates the animal’s blunt, aggressive features ensuring that, as the game unfolds, you’re not just flinging any old bison around, but a highly specific Luchador wrestler bison. He takes his work very seriously by the looks of it, and his brooding, focused presence – along with audio that conveys a nice sense of weight - has a lot to do with why it’s such a delight to send him on his way again and again.
Style
Burrito’s animation is pretty limited, but Juicy Beast gets the most out of it, ensuring that you never see the game’s protagonist in a pose that isn’t violent, powerful, or entirely ridiculous. The wobbling gummies, meanwhile, provide the perfect squishy foil for this brutal superhero as they stagger along and explode on impact. There are interesting hints regarding the wider Burrito universe, too. Why are there gummies watching attentively from the side-lines as their own people are slaughtered? Is this a sacrificial event, or some kind of gladiatorial combat for wrongdoers? Maybe, if I have another go, all will be revealed...
Imprecision
Randomness is the unstable ingredient at the heart of many great games, whether you find it in the spawning sequences of your enemies in Geometry Wars, or the order of the falling numbers in Drop7. Here, there’s a welcome element of imprecision to your initial aiming, handled with a kind of modified roulette wheel, and also in the patterns of massed gummies you’ll subsequently be encountering on your travels. That doesn’t mean you can’t find ways of tipping the odds in your favour, though, as the handy item shop allows you to alter everything from your bounciness to the frequency of special power-up gummies – all the while locking you into the long-term game.
Speed
Best of all, perhaps, is the fact that Burrito moves at quite a pace - not just with the headlong bounces of your Luchador, but with the swiftness in which the game goes through its cycles, spinning you from launch to flight to post-flight breakdown and then back to launch again. Those flights don’t last long in Juicy Beast’s world and, to be honest, there isn’t always a lot to do if you get your aiming wrong at the start, so it’s doubly gratifying to discover that you’ll still spend most of your time in Burrito Bison bouncing through the air rather than navigating in-game clutter.