Doomsday Diner sparks curiosity at face value: running a diner in an apocalyptic wasteland sounds intriguing, yet it is quite difficult to make into an entertaining game. Cubed3 clocks in with cautious anticipation and a healthy dose of scepticism for a day of cooking, cleaning, and slaughtering desperate robbers!
It is difficult not to notice Doomsday Diner. The concept is quite unique, and the trailer captures the campy atmosphere the game aims for. It is unusual to mention marketing in game reviews, but for a title that puts so many eggs in its premise, it would be unfair not to do so.
The trailer paints a charming picture of Doomsday Diner, selling it as an eccentric, campy retro workplace introduction video. The concept is simple: players take the role of a sausage chef at a diner, serving hot dogs and coffee while stopping armed robberies. At the end of the day, they have to clean up the place and throw any robber corpses into the dispenser.
The idea is very novel; however, the gameplay loop is repetitive and stressful. Great marketing can carry the novelty for roughly an hour, but it is clear that this is a game targeted at variety streamers to provide a fun, short segment in the middle of their streams.
This part is further emphasised by the use of the infamous, frustrating physics-based controls found in too many shovelware PC games. The sausages roll around all over the place, and sometimes things randomly fly across the room when being dropped, making the streamer look like a mess as they play, adding to the viewers’ pleasure. However, for the person with the mouse in their hand, it feels horrible to try to play it. The biggest issue is that the only point of difficulty in Doomsday Diner comes from those physics controls and the poor physics engine the game runs on.
To add to this jank, the game is also extremely unstable. If one, against all reason, pushes themselves deeper into the game, the later days will have a lot happening at the same time, and the engine is not exactly made for that. The result is that the game crashes very frequently once the player gets past around day 15, and especially past day 20. To add insult to injury, the coffee meter, which is used to enter bullet time, is emptied whenever the game crashes, adding an additional penalty to something completely out of the player’s control.
While this is certainly a novelty game for streamers first and foremost, it is just too poorly designed to be recommendable for anyone who isn’t getting paid to stream themselves playing horrible games. It is straight-up stressful and repetitive, like a nine-to-five job, so if someone wants that experience, they can find it anywhere and get paid for the trouble. If there is one entertaining thing about the Doomsday Diner, it is the small detail that the only way to get more meat for the sausages is to throw the robbers into the dispenser.
