After his partner takes the money and leaves, the owner of the taco stand needs YOUR help! Are you ready? No? Well too bad, GET READY TO MAKE SOME TACOS!
Taco Master puts you in the shoes of a taco maker. You’ll need to get your A-Game on, as you prepare to throw tacos together and fling them at your customers. At first it’ll be simple, but you’ll quickly be given more ingredients that you’ll quickly have to assemble and fling at the customers. Are you ready yet? Still no?
Taco Master is a pretty big technical mess. On the surface, the game looks extremely simplistic. In fact, it really is extremely simplistic. It should be a simple task to get the taco shell, get the meat, and then add whatever extras the order calls for. Unfortunately, it seems the Vita is unable to handle this… or the game is poorly coded.
While playing the game, you’ll notice that it often doesn’t take your touches to grab the various pieces. This is a bit of an issue when you’ve got a semi-time limit to how long you can fill an order. Even when it does take your touch, the game will randomly freeze up for half a second. This is just long enough to completely throw off your rhythm. It makes absolutely no sense as to why the Vita can’t handle this game and has these small hiccups, especially considering I’ve seen much more complex titles run perfectly fine on the system.
While the game does feature a ton of levels in the Career mode (approximately 110), they’re all the same basic concept. Even when the items you have to make are different, it’s still the game base concept. After the initial 30 levels, each section after does add something different to the formula that will either help (or hinder) your progress to become the top taco chef. In the Mexico levels, you’ll be given peanuts. Peanuts are extremely handy and I really wish they were available in every section. Peanuts can be given to your waiting customers to let them stay longer, giving you more time to prepare the tacos. In the zombie levels, the zombies will start trying to reach in to grab your ingredients, and you’ll have to tap on their hands to fend them off.
The Tropical Fury levels end up adding two things to the formula (*note: I only played the first 10 or so levels of zombie mode, so it’s possible that adds a second thing as well). The first is that apparently your stand is close enough to the shore that the waves can come crashing in on it. This causes some of the orders to come in soaking wet, making them much more difficult to read (it really isn’t that much harder to read as long as you can recognize the different pieces). The second are the crabs. Oh the crabs… The crabs will crawl in and, should they make it in close enough, they’ll jump onto your ingredients, and you can’t access that ingredient until you tap them away. The crabs also become extremely memorable as it’s very likely that getting rid of them will be the last thing you do to snag this platinum.
Outside of Career mode, there are two other mode options for you to choose from. The Arcade mode is essentially survival mode – fill as many orders as you can without losing a single order. The other is Time Attack mode, challenging you to fill a certain number of orders within the time limit. I absolutely loved Time Attack mode, and I really wish that the entire game had been more like it. You are given the orders one at a time, but more importantly you don’t have to constantly tap the order to check what it was they wanted. The order is plainly laid out for you to see, and when you tend to easily forget things, this is extremely nice.
Do I recommend Taco Master? If you’re looking for an easy-to-platinum Vita game, sure. However, as mentioned, the game suffers from some odd technical issues. It’ll randomly freeze up for half a second and it tends to ignore inputs quite a bit. When you’re there trying to get the gold medal on the levels, you’ll likely start to become quite irritated. This is definitely one of those “middle of the line” recommendations – if you want something hilarious that isn’t very good, then sure. However, if you value your sanity, even though it only costs around $3, I’d suggest passing on trying to become a taco master. Your sanity really will thank you.
Taco Master Review Score
2/5
While I’m here, let’s follow the example of something Emma previously did – let’s combine this with a Platinum Log. The Platinum in Taco Master is, quite frankly, fairly easy to get. Over the course of the whole game, there are only two trophies that will likely give you any sort of trouble – getting a gold medal in all of the Tropical Fury levels, and getting rid of 1000 crabs.
The road to gold medalling all levels in Tropical Fury is quite straightforward, at least up until you make it to level 30. This level has a massive difficulty jump for some reason, and a lot of getting the gold medal will come down to luck. You’ll need to get a fair bit of luck in what kinds of orders you receive. If you get a lot of simple (fish only) orders, you’re set as long as you can keep up a decent pace. If you’re thrown a lot of difficult orders, good luck. I also noticed the technical issues come up quite a bit more on this level, which can easily throw you off your pace towards getting the gold medal.
As for getting rid of 1000 crabs, the trophy that ended up being my last one, this is simply a matter of grinding. I simply kept repeating level 30 of Tropical Fury, completely ignoring all of the orders. I would simply just get rid of the crabs as they came in (or as I noticed them) while watching something in the meantime. So while it’s not exactly hard, it is a bit of a grind, especially since I only just got the get rid of 500 crabs when I first started trying level 30!
This is an insanely easy platinum to obtain. Not the easiest I’ve ever done, but it’s fairly high up there. As I said in the main review, if you’re looking for an easy platinum on the Vita, Taco Master is perfect for that. It also has a nice, low price of $3 (though I still waited for a sale), so it’s not even that expensive for the trophy hunters out there to get. Just be aware that it does randomly freeze up for that half of a second!
Taco Master Platinum Difficulty
.5/5
